According to the polls, if the Iowa caucuses were held today, Newt Gingrich would be the winner. And if the New Hampshire primary was held today, Mitt Romney would probably win. Those two results would probably set up a nationwide Romney/Gingrich slugfest that could play out state-by-state for a while: Gingrich could probably win South Carolina if Perry bottoms out in Iowa, Romney would then probably go on to win Florida and Nevada, and then once the race opened up into states like Maine and Minnesota, things would start getting weird, although I still think Romney's people will manage to drag the race out into a victory for their guy. That's the conventional wisdom. But the thing is that Iowa and New Hampshire are always unpredictable—hell, voters in both states tend to pride themselves on being unpredictable—and we've still got about four weeks until the voting starts.

What's more, we haven't been given all the information about what it's like on the ground in Iowa. Gingrich leads in just about every Iowa poll, but in the past, Iowa has traditionally been about organization and ground-level workers. That's why Obama and Huckabee were surprise winners in Iowa last time around: They quietly built up sturdy organizations of true believers who knew how the caucus system worked and were willing to work 24 hours a day for their candidate. Gingrich's organization is still, basically, in disarray. I don't think it's impossible that Gingrich could win Iowa with no organization there—maybe 24-hour news channels have finally made retail politicking obsolete—but the prospect of a Ron Paul victory in Iowa seems pretty real to me.

Consider that Ron Paul voters are incredibly steadfast in their convictions, and if they put their slickest supporters to the task, they could sweet-talk political neophytes and confused Teabaggers over to their side. (You know how every debate, Ron Paul says one or two things that makes liberals admit he sounds pretty good? In a caucus situation, there's no time to research all his other, more frightening, opinions.) If Ron Paul were to win Iowa, the press would fall all over themselves painting him as a dark horse, out-of-nowhere candidate, and it would be hard for any other candidates to get the spotlight back in time for New Hampshire. Paul will never win in states with a primary system, but he might attract attention away from Gingrich and the rest just long enough for New Hampshire to play out the way Romney's always been planning. And after that, Romney's team could turn it into a matter of momentum. A Ron Paul victory in Iowa, I think, pretty much sets up a Mitt Romney juggernaut.