Garnering support in the Liberal Democratic Party for former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto before Tuesday's LDP presidential poll was no easy task for staffers.

"Even if I asked them to vote for (Hashimoto), they didn't give me a clear response," one staffer told a recent meeting of the Hashimoto faction, the LDP's largest.

Another Hashimoto campaigner agreed that optimism may be unrealistic in the preliminary round of the LDP election, which will see roughly 2.4 million rank-and-file party members nationwide vote on Yoshiro Mori's successor as LDP chief.