Only a few probably dramatic hours remain before four survivors and maybe a fifth emerge from the Iowa caucuses.
So let’s assess the survivors and the drama.
• Donald Trump could well win the caucuses and go on to win New Hampshire and South Carolina. Then he would be on his once-unfathomable way to the Republican presidential nomination.
Acknowledging that, the mainstream Republican establishment that for months has engaged in head-shaking disdain for Trump and his silliness, and predicted his demise, has begun the process of warming to him and accepting him as the possible nominee.
Perhaps more to the point, the mainstream begins to accede to him as the one guy who might stop a candidate for whom it harbors even greater disdain, the one equal parts zealot and shameless showboat, meaning Ted Cruz.
The question is whether all these crowds and poll numbers for Trump will produce actual caucus-attenders. It is whether Trump’s campaign is a conventionally functioning one able to mobilize that attendance, not simply a traveling circus with soft support.
There are people on the right and left, and people who don’t know where they are along that conventional axis or care where we put them, who are frightened and angry over their personal economic situation and the state of politics in their country. And they don’t much care that Trump says incredibly vile and absurd things. They somehow like something about what he says and how he says it, and the independence he represents.
It’s Ross Perot with show-biz celebrity. It’s Perot with smaller ears and weirder hair.
• Cruz had momentum two weeks ago in Iowa. He had moved ahead of Trump. But he has subsequently cooled.
That’s because of Trump’s clever exploitation of questions about his Canadian-born eligibility to serve as president; Iowa Republican Gov. Terry Branstad’s attack on him for opposing ethanol subsidies important to Iowa corn growers, and the growing awareness of near-universal dislike of him within the Republican congressional membership, which suggests he can’t or won’t work with others.
Still, being the despised outsider has its advantages in the current Republican climate. And Cruz remains the leading evangelical religious candidate, which was enough for Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012.
A record turnout, which some forecast, would suggest a Trump win. A regular turnout would suggest a close race between Trump and Cruz.
Cruz pretty seriously needs a win, not a fading second.
• Marco Rubio, still the top alternative as the “establishment” candidate, is the variable, meaning the possible fifth survivor.
He appears to have become mildly energized in Iowa in the last few days.
The Des Moines Register endorsed him. Iowa’s conservative U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst has campaigned with him. And he is spreading a message that he is more effective than Cruz and saner than Trump — low bars, somebody observed.
Rubio has been telling decent-sized crowds that he is the wholly conservative candidate who won’t have his supporters wincing when he talks or regretting their support.
If he can get to a third-place position showing a modicum of strength — well ahead of fourth place and within sight of second — then he will go into New Hampshire, friendlier terrain, with something maybe not amounting to momentum, but offering arguable hope.
• Hillary Clinton is still almost certain to be the Democratic nominee owing to the long game and black support and super-delegate backing.
But she could well lose Iowa and then New Hampshire and signal weakness that would fascinate the media and delight and energize Republicans. It would make her eventual nomination something she backed into only by the good fortune of having a socialist opponent, albeit one who gave her fits in her weakness.
She needs an Iowa win. A percentage point will do. It will save her a lot of woe.
But the Iowa caucuses tend to be about inspiration. And Hillary doesn’t much inspire. Her inspiring days were with Bill in 1992, which was 25 years ago, when many of these caucus-goers weren’t born.
• Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old Democratic socialist of avuncular passion, is the one inspiring those kids.
I recall from eight years ago that local liberal activist Jay Barth, the Hendrix professor and writer, went to Iowa for the last few days of the campaign and sent dispatches to the blog of the Arkansas Times. I remember the palpable energy and excitement in his accounts of last-weekend rallies for the hope and change of Barack Obama, who would then win the caucuses while Hillary limped to third.
Look for that excitement and energy to be all on Bernie’s side this last dramatic weekend. And look for him to run Hillary a close race, and maybe even beat her and get her off to the slow start she’d really like not to have to endure.
Meantime, you have former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg saying that, if these parties give us the blowhard Trump and the socialist Sanders, he may get in. There certainly would be an opening for somebody.
I’m still saying Clinton versus Rubio, and steadily less comfortable predicting the latter.
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.