Is Mike Huckabee Rudy’s silver bullet?

Admittedly, it’s just speculation. But we’ve got almost two months before the results start coming in. So for the moment, speculation is all we got. So hear me out.

The first few soundings could have been outliers. But there’s now no question that the Mike Huckabee surge in Iowa is real. It may even be that he’s peaking too early. A series of recent polls out of Iowa have him moving solidly into second place behind front-runner Mitt Romney. And a new ARG poll released Wednesday shows the two in a dead heat for first place. In fact, among the admittedly rather small sample of registered Republicans, Huckabee now has a slight — and statistically insignificant — lead, 24 percent to 23.

Now, Huckabee has little organization outside of Iowa and the classic problem of not enough money and infrastructure to effectively capitalize on a strong showing in Iowa. So even though some election watchers believe he’s the GOP sleeper candidate of this cycle, I doubt Huckabee’s going to be the nominee. But the issue is less what a Huckabee “win” does for Huckabee and more what it could do to Mitt Romney.

There’s been a loose assumption for a while that Romney will sweep or at least dominate the early primaries. But if Huckabee wins in Iowa (and depending on the state of the expectations game in early January, a strong second could be a “win”), it could be devastating for him.

Let’s walk through it.

If Romney doesn’t win Iowa, then anything but a crushing victory in New Hampshire amounts to a loss since it’s his backyard (a big chunk of New Hampshire is part of the Boston media market and many New Hampshirites work in Massachusetts). And if there’s no momentum coming out of either Iowa or New Hampshire, it’s really hard to see how he does well in South Carolina since he’s never been ahead there in the first place.

Rudy Giuliani’s primary strategy is one that’s never worked before — ignore the low-count early primaries and come back strong in the nationwide set of primaries on Feb. 5. He’s not the first to try that game. And it seems reasonable in theory. But it’s never worked for anyone.

Romney’s strategy is the more conventional and historically successful one: Capitalize on momentum coming out of the first contests just as most voters are really starting to pay attention to the race. But live by the mo’, die by the mo’. Romney has invested record-breaking sums on TV advertising. And tons of conventional wisdom is invested in seeing his ample leads in Iowa and New Hampshire converted into victories in January. A loss in Iowa — or a disappointing win — sets the expectations going into New Hampshire very high. So it’s not hard to see how a bad night in Iowa could set in motion a chain of events that could end Romney’s candidacy.

And that brings us to Rudy. The big risk of the Rudy strategy — and on balance I’d say it’s a fatal one — is that you just can’t hang back and let another candidate be the winner for a month and think you can hold your soft leads in those other states. But if Romney collapses, will there really be a dominant candidate coming out of the first three contests? Seems much more likely it’ll be a muddle. It’s hard to figure how Huckabee’s pitch plays that well in increasingly Democratic and strongly (among Republicans) libertarian New Hampshire. Perhaps McCain pulls off some of the same magic as in 2000, though that seems unlikely.

I admit there are a lot of moving pieces to my theory. But the Republican contest is such a jumble that I think it’s as likely a scenario as any other. And if I were on the Rudy campaign, I’d be rooting for Huckabee big-time.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it