One unknown is this: somebody is going to win the Iowa Democratic caucus. Somebody will win the Republican caucus in the Hawkeye state. Somebody (the same candidate? someone different?) will win the New Hampshire Democratic primary election. Same same for the New Hampshire Republican primary election.
Everyone's trying to figure out what effect that will have. Will the winning candidates in Iowa gain momentum ("big mo", as George Bush Sr. memorably put it in 1980) and thus win coming primaries? Many pundits and observers speculate about this. I have too. Concerning the Democrats, I've supposed that, even though Hillary Clinton is the favorite to win the nomination, if she loses Iowa, it's a "whole new ballgame." Others think that, if Mitt Romney wins both Iowa and New Hampshire (as he's spent millions to try to do), he would be the likely Republican nominee. But if he loses Iowa, he's in trouble.
But you know, we don't know that. Do people voting in primary elections REALLY vote for candidates because they have "momentum", because they won last week, because "oh, well, he/she's going to win the nomination anyway", because candidates get a lot of ink in the media, etc? Only on those bases? We don't know. A lot of things are different this year. The campaigns began earlier. A whole bunch of primaries are compressed into a short time period. Candidates, once we get past Iowa and New Hampshire, can't possibly be everywhere where there will be primaries and caucuses. So therefore won't money and organization and media coverage gain more importance? That would seem to bode better for Senator Clinton. On the other hand, how a campaign responds to poorer-than-expected showings will be important, too (remember Howard Dean's "scream" of 2004), and that doesn't augur well for Senator Clinton's campaign, which has thrashed about as of late in response to her recent troubles and slippages. The Huckabee campaign has taken off like a rocket in Iowa. But would a victory there and the resultant media coverage be all he needs in New Hampshire (he reportedly has little organization there.) We don't know. Can the Giuliani campaign, on the other hand, lose Iowa and New Hampshire and still be viable? Right now he's very popular in places like Florida. Could a later victory there save his campaign? That's something else we don't know. Rudy and his people have this strategy, though, and appear to be confidently sticking to it. Maybe they know something we don't. We'll see.
