Iowa and New Hampshire exist this primary year only to weed out the candidates who properly have no business campaigning. On the Democratic side, that is Martin O'Malley. On the Republican side, it is everyone not named Trump or Cruz and, perhaps, a sole surviving "establishment" candidate.
South Carolina will decide the nominee of the Democratic Party, almost certainly, and quite possibly that of the Republican Party.
Iowa and New Hampshire, with their proportional delegate distribution, will keep Bernie Sanders in the race until South Carolina. He and Hillary Clinton will split the delegates in the two states in whatever way the chips happen to fall, 55% of them to Clinton, 45% to Sanders is my guess, but South Carolina's entire 50 delegates, with its winner-take-all distribution, will all go to HRC. She will have a huge lead, and at that point Sanders will, presumably, drop out of the race. The only reasons he wouldn't: desire to keep his "message" out there (kudos to him, yes, and fuck the billionaire class); the conviction he is inspired by whatever god he believes in (probably something to do with dialectical materialism); he's a bored old man who likes the attention -- the Ralph Nader Syndrome (I doubt it).
Things are much more interesting on the Republican side, in a horse-race sort of way, with a dozen or so candidates still in the mix at this point, though "mix" might not apply to the candidates who seem to have fallen out of the mixing bowl. Several of them simply don't belong here, polling very badly, "Martin O'Malley" bad, even: Santorum, Huckabee, Fiorina, Paul. To receive any delegates in Iowa and NH a candidate must get at least 15 percent of the vote. None of those four will. The first three will fold after Iowa, unless they're simply having too much fun with all the fol-de-rol, though Rand Paul might stick around as a "message" candidate -- and of course he won't want to disappoint Dad. Ben Carson will continue to run as long as it generates decent book sales. Frankly, his campaign should more properly be covered by Writer's Digest than by the news and politics journals. His is one of the more outside-the-box book-marketing campaigns I've seen, and will no doubt inspire dozens of future memoirists to run for the highest office in the land. The real race is and will be between Trump and Cruz -- and one and no more than one surviving "establishment" candidate.
As with Clinton and Sanders on the Democratic side, delegates will split neatly between Trump and Cruz, quite possibly all of them, as no other candidate might achieve the 15 percent level to be considered for delegate apportionment. South Carolina, again, will decide the story. If Cruz wins all the delegates there, his lead will be substantial enough that Loser Donald might not want to continue running a Loser Race, the dummy. Sad. If Trump wins, Cruz will probably drop out, if his national polling numbers are still substantially lower than the Donald's.
For an "establishment" GOP candidate to survive after South Carolina, the others had best drop out soon after Iowa. Of the four: Bush, Kasich, Rubio, Christie -- Gov. Christie probably has the best chance of competing against the Trump/Cruz phenomena. Bush is simply unlikable. Unless you're Eric Cantor. Which proves the point. The only thing Left and Right agree on is that Jeb Bush is truly unlikable. John Kasich is simply unlistenable. He is as unlistenable as Bush is unlikable. Has 90 seconds ever lasted so long than when listening to a Kasich response to a debate question? Rubio is a lightweight, to put it mildly. He belongs running the gate at a Tony Robbins seminar. Christie, however, for all his flaws, or perhaps because of them, can be seen as a viable alternative to the "nutty" candidates. He can bluster and bully like Trump. (One imagines his dismay when Trump entered the race just before him, immediately staking out a claim to the "shout out your love for bullying" terrain.) He can be as mean-spirited as Cruz. ("Bridge Lane to Nowhere.") He embraces the blame-the-victim generator that keeps the lights on in the bunker that is the postmodern GOP. (Lock you up if you've ever been anywhere near Ebola.) If he survives after New Hampshire, and if the other "establishment" candidates drop out and endorse him, he could be disruptive enough to keep either Trump or Cruz from a clear majority. At which point Christie would likely be anointed at a brokered convention as the only seemingly normal GOP choice.
Handicapping the races at this point is simple on the Democratic side: Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, not so much. Trump, if he dominates early on. If he doesn't, then possibly Christie, if enough of the others drop out and endorse him. Cruz does not seem likely. He really is as unliked as all the rumors indicate, and dislike at the highest levels of politics, as always, has a way of bringing you down.
We will know so much more after South Carolina. Perhaps more than we want to know.
