Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Tara Palmeri.

We’re finally rolling into a primary contest. I’ll be in Iowa on Saturday, either bundled up in a blue puffer or cozied up to the Marriott bar. Until then, I’ve been chatting with Iowa experts on my podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win. Last night, I broke down what may be the last G.O.P. debate (or possibly the last debate of the presidential cycle) with Jimmy Centers. And earlier this week, my Puck partner Tina Nguyen was on the pod to explore the inner belly of the MAGA-verse and how she escaped it. You need to preorder a copy of her book, The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out), if you haven’t already.

But first… the latest from Abby Livingston on the Hill…

• If Johnson sticks with the Schumer deal, he may face the wrath of the hardliners in his own party, but his credibility is on the line in a different way outside of the Freedom Caucus if he backs out. The harshest commentary of the day came from an unlikely source, the amiable Democrat Steny Hoyer. “You can only do that so many times and have any credibility or respect for the way you do business,” the former whip told reporter Jennifer Shutt.

  Naturally, Senate Republicans watched the House drama over the last few days like rubbernecking drivers. On Tuesday, Senate minority whip John Thune expressed dismay at House Republicans’ intransigence on Ukraine funding. Regarding the spending bill drama, Senate Approps ranking member Susan Collins noted renegotiations would be “extremely difficult” (this is saucy for Collins). Meanwhile, John Cornyn, another former whip, suggested that the speaker “make a hard decision and get it behind you and move on to the next one, rather than try to reconsider the same decision over and over again.” This doesn’t feel like Senate snobbery. This is Senate speak for alarm and bewilderment.

• Even if a shutdown is avoided and Congress manages to fund the government, pass a border bill, sort out Ukraine funding, etcetera, this sort of chaos eats up time. Yesterday’s failed vote cost House Republicans a full day of their majority. Sure, wasting a single floor day is only embarrassing, but Republicans already lost the entire fall to this same drama, and the political environment in the House feels less stable now than it did in early September, just before McCarthy’s ouster. Under these current circumstances and margins, disrupted and defeated votes may become part of the process. At best, this merely means that the Republicans will have less time to put votes on the floor. But with this kind of unpredictability, it feels like there is endless potential for unforeseen electoral consequences.

This cycle has been largely devoid of surprises, but this week served up a couple interesting micro-developments. Wednesday night’s G.O.P. debate was the last chance for Haley or DeSantis to knock the other off, but neither candidate sufficiently outperformed expectations, and neither made the sort of major mistake that might change the calculus. At this point, their fates appear to be sealed, beyond the question of who snatches second place. After all, Iowans have had the opportunity to assess their options for the better part of a year, often up close. Now there will just be questions about whether it made sense for DeSantis’s super PAC to spend $150 million on a ground operation if Haley manages to beat him with half the organization, coupled with a few good debates and town halls.

Sadly for DeSantis, he finally seems to be hitting his stride. His performances at his CNN town hall and this week’s debate demonstrated a more personable, confident product. He was calmer, betrayed fewer tics, and attacked Trump more incisively. (Haley, for her part, appeared rattled at times.) More importantly, after nine months, he finally nailed his closing argument: “Donald Trump is running for his issues,” he said. “Nikki Haley’s running for her donors’ issues. I’m running for your issues. I’m running for your families’ issues. And I’m running to turn this country around.”

Also sadly, this simple but effective piece of political rhetoric followed a year of expensive, highly consultant-managed, and meaningless trial balloon pablum like, “Fight. Win. Lead.” and “Never Back Down”—to say nothing of the endless references to his record in Florida, which G.O.P. voters in other states never seemed to care about. But timing is everything in politics. His attack on Haley’s donors materialized only after many of the same donors soured on DeSantis. On the trail, he’s starting to lean into town halls and retail politics, and has enjoyed mixing it up in the campaign scrum with his old congressional colleagues Thomas Massie and Chip Roy, I’m told. Alas, it’s all a little too late for DeSantis, who set his own bar too high and now finds himself jousting for relevance.

Haley, who is less fixated on Iowa, has differentiated herself as the generational change candidate, at least compared to the 77-year-old Trump and 81-year-old Joe Biden. It’s a lane that DeSantis has ceded despite being the youngest viable 2024 candidate. (Sorry, Vivek.) She has also stood out on the debate stage, where her memorable scraps with Ramaswamy over foreign policy solidified her credibility among more moderate voters as one of the few adults in the room.

But Haley, as Chris Christie noted on his hot mic, isn’t entirely ready for primetime. Last night, Haley was clearly flustered in the head-to-head setting, spinning word salad as she tried to balance her appeal to conservatives in Iowa with the more iconoclastic New Hampshire crowd. DeSantis, by comparison, was more confident tacking to the right in his go-for-broke appeal to Iowans, helping him to stay confidently on-message. And while Haley has long been praised as the best political performer in the ’24 field, she had yet to experience the sort of grilling she got last night. Perhaps her most tactical move has been lowering expectations in Iowa, accepting third but trying to frame a second-place finish as a veritable victory—a bar she now looks likely to clear. If she can keep Trump under 50 points, even better.

Of course, the fact that Christie didn’t endorse Haley in his exit speech was probably a gift for her campaign: He had some of the highest unfavorables among Republican voters. Releasing his supporters to flow to Haley without making the linkage explicit could help her to remain unsullied by the anti-Trump stain. Anyway, there’s a chance that Christie’s exit could actually lead to the first real surprise of the presidential race, which has been largely, stupefyingly predictable. His withdrawal isn’t so much an advantage for Haley in Iowa, where Christie is polling at 4 percent, but it could be material in New Hampshire, where he’s polling at 12 percent. If Haley could gain 10 points from that anti-Trump crowd, she could feasibly beat Trump, if she truly is within seven points like the CNN/UNH poll suggests. (The RealClearPolitics polling average puts Trump’s lead over her at 14 points, prior to Christie dropping out.)

There’s still the DeSantis question, too. If he drops out after Iowa, will his “Trump-curious” voters flock to Trump, or will some go to Haley? And could DeSantis staying in the race in New Hampshire actually help Haley? (According to Trump’s own internal polling in New Hampshire, he beats her by eight points if it’s a head-to-head.) Of course, there are a lot of “ifs” and endless demoralizing caveats: New Hampshire voters tend to be more educated and independent than other states and with an open primary allowing independents and Democrats to vote, that could give Haley an advantage. Frankly, at the moment, it’s really the only state where she has a real shot at victory. She’s currently 20-30 points behind Trump in her home state of South Carolina.

As for Trump, he’s running against himself, and his chillingly authoritarian message—“I am your retribution”—was a bit muted during last night’s Fox News town hall. While addressing an audience nearly double the size of the CNN debate’s, he suggested that he would not be as extreme on abortion as the rest of the party (while simultaneously taking credit for killing Roe v. Wade), downplayed his dictator aspirations, and then added, “I’m not going to have the time for retribution.” Right! In any case, he appeared to be playing for a general election audience, and knows Iowa is going to be a blowout anyway.

As for Christie walking off the stage, saying he’s not interested in being a spoiler, I learned last night that his political advisers and donors had been trading calls with No Labels for the past few weeks. (A source close to Christie downplayed it, saying they weren’t “serious discussions.”) The group has been dangling the idea of running a third-party candidate as an insurance policy against Biden and Trump, but has been split on whether a Republican or a Democrat should lead their unity ticket. They have a nearly $70 million initiative to get their line on the ballots in all 50 states. As of late, their polling shows that a Republican on the top of the ticket would help defeat Trump, whom they see as the bigger threat than Biden. The one thing working against Christie is the “sore loser” laws in a number of states that forbid a candidate on the ballot for one party to come back and run on a another party line. Whether those laws would stand in federal court is up for interpretation, and is currently being explored.