WORMLEYSBURG — The idea of cutting taxes for corporations is something Americans have long felt was a bad idea.

That’s what they’ve told pollsters, anyway. Yet President Donald Trump and his allies are betting that many voters just need someone to explain to them how a corporate tax cut would unleash an economic bonanza, with new jobs, faster growth and ample pay raises. And they’re taking that message right to some voters’ doorsteps in hopes of igniting a surge of support.

So on an unseasonably hot Saturday recently, a chipper Ashley Klingensmith canvassed a neighborhood of stately colonial homes outside Harrisburg. Using an iPad, she rang the doorbells of people presumed to be sympathetic to the notion of revamping the federal tax code. And indeed, all but one of the nine she and a colleague interviewed agreed that corporate taxes should be lowered as Trump and Republican leaders have proposed in hopes of further strengthening the job market.

Yet not everyone saw it as an urgent problem that a president who is facing other tough problems must solve this year.

“He has so much on his plate that it’s going to be hard to get the Congress to focus on that, what with how many thousands of pages of the IRS tax code that’s out there, that need to be redone,” said Leora Kirkpatrick, a retiree.

At some other homes, Klingensmith encountered people prepared to blame Republicans in Congress — rather than the president — if a tax overhaul failed, whether or not it included a corporate tax cut.

“We’ve got a Congress that doesn’t do anything,” said Harold DeGarmo, who retired after working for the Army for 40 years. “I think (Trump) is doing good, trying to. The Republicans are fighting him.”

The canvassing was part of a 35-state operation spearheaded by Americans for Prosperity, a group backed by the billionaire Koch brothers’ network.

Trump’s tax plan would slash business taxes by $2.65 trillion over a decade while increasing the tax burden on families and individuals by $471 billion, according to a preliminary analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

The sales job amounts to a test of whether Trump’s allies can galvanize ordinary people on an issue as complex and polarizing as taxes. A Washington Post-ABC News poll in September reported that 65 percent of Americans said they believed large companies paid too little in taxes.