You heard it here first.

He leads the second tier in cash-on-hand. He was able to get 1,200 people out to the Hy-Vee (has any candidate done something that big on their own, not at an RPI event?). His home base in Texas isn’t that far of a drive, and his people are motivated enough to come in from out of state for him. And he’s making a big push on his Web site, which for all intents and purposes, is his campaign.

Romney, given his dominant position organizationally in Iowa, should still win. Even with the rest of the top tier not participating, he won’t be able to let his guard down, lest he be ambushed by one of the second tier. Should Romney underperform against someone not even playing at Ames, or against someone not taken seriously, that’s a blow to his Iowa inevitability.

Does Paul placing a close second make the straw poll and its winner into a laughingstock? Do benched McCain or Giuliani supporters direct people to vote for Paul to ensure that outcome? Or does this portend something bigger? I see that Ron Paul is up to 3% in the Gallup poll, above Huckabee and Brownback. He won’t come close to winning, but can he aggregate whatever Bilderburger and Trilateral Commission-phobic votes there are in his corner, in the same way that Lyndon LaRouche could get 15% in a Democratic primary against Bill Clinton?

And what’s happened to Huckabee and Brownback? Conn Carroll and I got into a lengthy “What about Huckabee?” discussion on BloggingHeads.tv. Intellectually, the Huckabee campaign seemed to make sense in the context of the standard playbook of GOP campaigns. With no Country-Western candidates and no authentic pro-lifers in the race, and with his personal connection to the pastors, he has/had a chance to break out in Iowa. Where this theory breaks down is that the interest groups may not matter so much in GOP politics anymore. What matters is going to your base directly, which only Fred Thompson, Ron Paul, and maybe Mitt Romney are doing. Can Huckabee or Brownback be carried by the church lists, or is the drawn out calendar and the Internet helping Evangelicals to make their own independent assessments (which is why Rudy isn’t getting killed, BTW)?