Suddenly the Arkansas Republican presidential primary a week from today looms as a relevant donnybrook.
Its relevance is to the national race, coming early as part of a large regional affair at a defining point in the nomination process.
It portends a donnybrook by definition: "A scene of uproar and disorder."
It will pit:
• Marco Rubio, who is Mitt Romney with personality and without the Mormonism, backed by most of the state's Republican establishment, meaning members of Congress and state constitutional officers and legislators.
• Ted Cruz, who is Jason Rapert with an Ivy League education, backed by the evangelicals who reject the idea of separation of our state and their theocracy--and who, as much as wanting their religion imposed, want America to go back to Mayberry days when the deputy didn't need a bullet in his gun and there were no known homosexuals running about getting married.
• Donald Trump, who is not backed by anyone in an official capacity, of course, but is a modern national incarnation of Tommy Robinson, the "Talking Tall" political giant of Arkansas from the late '80s. That is to say he is heroically popular with irascibly independent working-class people who think the country has gone to hell and that we need a no-bull guy from television to bring it back.
The only poll of that matchup in Arkansas that I've seen was conducted a couple of weeks ago for Talk Business and Politics and Hendrix College. It showed Cruz with 27 percent and Rubio and Trump with 23 percent each.
Cruz had worked the state harder than the others at that point. He had won overwhelmingly a straw vote of the Republican State Committee, even with Mike Huckabee still in the race.
But former state Rep. John Burris told me in a television interview that the Republican State Committee wasn't representative of the general party, and, in fact, would probably give a strong vote to zany eternal candidate Curtis Coleman against U.S. Sen. John Boozman.
My sense is that Cruz has leveled off in Arkansas since then. In part that's because his campaign keeps getting caught using dirty tactics. In part it's because Trump keeps winning primaries.
And in part it's because Rubio, after a disastrously robotic debate performance that had him declared dead two weeks ago, keeps proclaiming himself a winner even when he isn't.
So here's what we have: Cruz formerly at 27 percent and leveling off; Rubio formerly at 23 percent and enjoying a coalescence of the party establishment that wants desperately to stop both Trump and Cruz, and fresh off a nice rally in Little Rock on Sunday; and Trump formerly at 23 percent and reveling in two big wins in a row and the afterglow of a giant rally at Barton Coliseum.
All three candidates conceivably could hover around 30 percent, with the rest going to John Kasich and Ben Carson.
Many of us expect Rubio to pick up Jeb Bush supporters, such as they are, now that Bush has backed out. In the Talk Business poll of Arkansas, Rubio would soar all the way from 23 percent to 24 with Jeb's votes.
I still predict a Hillary Clinton-Rubio contest in the fall. I abandoned the prediction only briefly, after the debate robotics. But a cycle of abandonment and reinstatement is merely an exercise in pundit's license.
People have been wondering why I and so many others keep talking up Rubio when Trump keeps winning states.
It's because the race will inevitably boil down to Trump and Cruz versus the surviving rival from the GOP establishment, which does, in fact, exist, and which can't abide either of those fellows. So that establishment stands prepared to lather Rubio, who has now vanquished establishment rival Jeb, with all the money he needs if he can survive competitively to March 15.
After that, big states will fall rapidly like dominoes with primaries that won't apportion delegates according to vote percentages, as is the case early, but as winner-take-all affairs, with the winner being the candidate with a mere plurality in that three-man battle royal.
The calendar was set up that way for the very purpose of facilitating an establishment-funded stretch run by the anointed candidate.
My bet remains that Rubio, with the help next week of places like Arkansas, will remain competitive as of March 15 and then win more than his share of the winner-take-all states after that.
When in Little Rock on Sunday, Rubio granted an interview to Roby Brock of Talk Business and Politics, who asked Rubio where he thought he might start actually winning states.
"Maybe Arkansas," Rubio said.
That sounds pretty relevant for our new little red haven.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 02/23/2016