Rich, there’s a painful quote from a Ron DeSantis surrogate, over in Semafor:

DeSantis predicted a victory in the state last month, while Haley has long banked on New Hampshire as her stronger state, and both sides have tried to tamp down expectations as polls show Trump continuing to expand his Iowa lead. Offstage, the candidate’s supporters alternated between questioning the validity of the polls, and admitting that they might have to spin a second-place finish on Monday.

“I taught my kids that second place is just first loser, right?” said Amy Sinclair, the president of the Iowa state senate, and an early DeSantis endorser. “But that being said, in a long race like this, Iowa is not the last stop. It’s the first stop among many.”

Thank you, Ricky Bobby’s dad. With surrogates like this, who needs critics?

DeSantis is likely to finish second Monday night. He might finish better than expected; I’ve heard that the DeSantis campaign’s extensive door-knocking efforts should have him finishing with a larger percentage than his final polls. But it might be a distant second, and if the results are like the latest Suffolk University poll, DeSantis might finish third.

A third-place finish would raise a tough question: If DeSantis can’t reach second place in a state where he visited all 99 counties, the governor endorsed him, he’s spent a lot on ads, etc. … which state will he win? Because it probably isn’t going to be Florida.

In today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote:

There is another debate scheduled for next week, and it looks like DeSantis will qualify only because he is unlikely to finish fourth Monday:

Candidates will be invited to participate in the New Hampshire debate if they receive at least 10 percent in three separate national and/or New Hampshire polls of Republican primary voters that meet CNN’s standards for reporting. One of the three polls must be an approved CNN poll of likely New Hampshire Republican primary voters. Candidates who finish in one of the top three positions in the Iowa caucuses will receive an invitation to participate in the New Hampshire debate.

This assumes, of course, that Haley would want to debate DeSantis one-on-one again. If she finishes ahead of DeSantis in Iowa, and remains ahead of him in New Hampshire… how much does she have to gain from another one-on-one debate?