Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Tara Palmeri, reporting from Manchester, where I’m getting the vibe that next week’s New Hampshire primary might not provide Nikki Haley with the results she needs to grab the momentum going into her home state of South Carolina—where, of course, Trump is dominating her by 30 points.

Meanwhile, the Democrats also have their primary on the same night, even though the D.N.C. is not acknowledging the delegates. And while Joe Biden hasn’t made it to the Granite State, and neither the White House nor the campaign are officially involved in the write-in effort, they have surely been sending a lot of surrogates: Nine Biden cabinet members have visited New Hampshire in as many weeks, and big-name surrogates like Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro have either visited or plan to visit to support the effort.

🎙️ On my podcast Somebody’s Gotta Win, I spoke with New Hampshire political insider Drew Cline about how the Biden surrogate stampede could depress support for Haley among unaffiliated Democratic voters who might be inclined to vote for her as a protest against Trump. After all, if you believe the polls, Haley would be a much tougher opponent for Biden than Trump. (Since this email comes a day before my usual Thursday send, subscribe here, before the episode drops tomorrow.)

💰 Also, if you haven’t already, make sure to check out my partner Teddy Schleifer’s exclusive reporting yesterday on next month’s Mar-a-Lago high-dollar fundraiser, an event that Trump’s team is not-so-subtly messaging as a last chance for reticent mega-donors to get on the right side of history before he runs away with the nomination. “I don’t know if there’s a deadline where we won’t accept your money,” one Trump fundraising source told Teddy. But “if you want to be a kitchen cabinet person, that’s a cutoff.” The gauntlet has been thrown down…

Tonight, news and notes on the DeSantis death march post-Iowa. But first, here’s Abby Livingston with the view from Capitol Hill…

• Does Johnson have the votes?: Any optimism must be tempered by the reality of the speaker’s inexperience and, more consequentially, the deepening instability of the House G.O.P. conference. If Congress can avoid a shutdown, it may validate Johnson’s political skills over the more-seasoned Kevin McCarthy. But remember, the real trick isn’t simply negotiating the stopgap funding, but avoiding a McCarthy-style public defenestration. Johnson has a clean slate with all parties involved, so he may well succeed. But this unknown is why, despite Schumer’s buoyant attitude, it’s wise to take a wait-and-see approach during the next few days. Sometimes, seemingly inevitable shutdowns are resolved at the last minute, and other times, shutdowns sneak up on Capitol Hill.

• Will the hardliners revolt?: My sources say Johnson isn’t in any imminent trouble, but the inability of the House G.O.P. conference to fund the government beyond these six-week spurts means that both his speakership and majority are in perpetual crisis. Every budget renegotiation affords the Freedom Caucus hardliners another opportunity to pull the motion-to-vacate trigger. And, of course, each of these members has their own priorities and diverging incentives, leaving Johnson little room to maneuver around his ever-shrinking margin.
• Shoulda coulda woulda…: Johnson’s dilemma illuminates precisely why so many past speakers have kept members in town deep into the end-of-year holiday recess, as leverage to pass a long-term spending bill and allow the Hill to move on to other agenda items in January. It wasn’t exactly clever or strategic for House members to race out of town on December 14, depriving Johnson of the ability to threaten them with missing Christmas.

  Anyway, in the event that the two chambers can move quickly enough on a bill to prevent (or mitigate) a shutdown this week, Congress will have to take up this same fight again in early March. Alas, there is no demonstrable evidence that more time would allow appropriators and leaders the chance to come together and pass that elusive, magical long-term bill. And this is a recurring, festering problem. We are now in election season, when Capitol Hill drama tends to fade into the background. But it’s very possible that when it comes to keeping the government doors open, it’s lather, rinse, repeat dysfunction.

But the reality is that DeSantis is also on track to get humiliated in New Hampshire next Tuesday. Despite having spent several days in the state this week, I’ve struggled to find a single DeSantis supporter. Voters I’ve talked to here do not care for his six-week abortion ban, or his culture warring with Disney and Florida’s school librarians. So, unsurprisingly, a recent Suffolk poll shows him at just 5 percent support in the state. (That same poll suggests that Haley also has an uphill battle, at 34 percent to Trump’s 50.) “DeSantis spends all of his time explaining, and that doesn’t work. People want to come to an event and they want to get hot. In New Hampshire, they want to get high; they want to come to a rally and leave it feeling excited and fired up, and you don’t get that at all with DeSantis,” said Drew Cline, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a conservative New Hampshire think tank. “That’s a big reason why he’s not doing well here.”

Team DeSantis thinks they can still alter this narrative by juicing the polls in South Carolina, carpet bombing the state with ads, and training their fire on Haley. “When Nikki Haley fails to win her home state, she’ll be finished and this will be a two-person race—and her donors are starting to come to the same conclusion,” said DeSantis campaign senior official Andrew Romeo in a statement.

The RealClearPolitics polling average for South Carolina currently shows Trump at 52 percent, Haley at 22, and DeSantis at 11. And in this media-driven campaign cycle—as evidenced by the fact that Haley almost beat him in Iowa despite his $200 million ground game—the DeSantis team desperately needs more media attention to keep him in the running. But if DeSantis insists on slouching onward to South Carolina, which is still over a month away, after getting pummeled in the three previous contests (Nevada is looking like a disaster for him as well), the storylines around his campaign will… not be kind. That is, if the media continues to cover the campaign at all.

There’s concern that it will look like DeSantis’s ego is too big to accept the results. And of course, there are lessons to be learned from prior cycles. To wit: Perhaps Ted Cruz’s endorsement of Trump last night still mattered because he decided to drop out of the 2016 race when he was still winning states, long before John Kasich, who limped on until May. Kasich has been in political oblivion ever since. DeSantis might also look to the fate of Marco Rubio, another onetime rising star from Florida who held on for far too long, only to lose his home state. (Like Rubio, DeSantis appears headed for a shellacking in Florida, where Trump is currently leading him by 40 points, according to the RealClear average.) Rubio isn’t a nonentity—he’s still a senator, after all—but with his political capital diminished, he never got another shot at the presidency. (Indeed, he’s rumored to be looking for more lucrative options outside of the Senate—which could open a seat for DeSantis, who will be in between jobs when he’s term-limited out of office in 2026.)

But DeSantis doesn’t appear to have absorbed those lessons. The day after the Iowa caucus, in a morning call with donors, his team presented a plan that would take them through Super Tuesday, in March—even though he’s not currently expected to win any upcoming state. (Well, they have touted his chances at winning the U.S. Virgin Islands, on February 8. I know, I know. Like how Mike Bloomberg spent $500 million to only win American Samoa.) The campaign also told donors they’ll do a head fake in New Hampshire, ceding the race to Haley in a state they claim they don’t want to win anyway. It’s unclear if he’ll even be in New Hampshire on election day. Then it’s on to South Carolina, where they can help Trump finish off Haley in her home state, even though there’s no path for DeSantis to win there either.

Of course, Trump will never drop out because of legal problems—Trump is running because of his legal problems. Short of Trump landing in prison, this looks more like a ploy for DeSantis to collect another $5 million or so from donors so that he can sustain his countrywide tour as he fades into irrelevance. To continue on that jaunt, DeSantis—whose campaign was once one of the largest, with nearly 60 aides—will likely have to lay off more staff. The New York Times reported that his super PAC, Never Back Down, has been reducing headcount, including among its notoriously pit-bullish digital War Room.

In the meantime, DeSantis will need passable answers to the increasingly difficult questions he’ll face, including, “Why are you still in the race?” and “How do you perceive a path forward?” Easier said than done: “He’s going to look like a fucking clown,” the source close to the campaign said. “He’s not going to handle the question as gracefully as others have when they’re asking for the math.”

Then there will be the pressure campaign from supporters, influencers, and party leaders, alike, who will be telling him to get out. It belatedly worked on Chris Christie, who bowed out gracefully just before Iowa. But unlike Christie, whose searing attacks on Trump lifted his national profile, DeSantis can’t expect any grace from the media. Instead, he’ll be faced with the same catch-22 that has hobbled his entire campaign: He might distinguish himself by attacking Trump, but it’ll be too little, too late to move the needle with voters. And it’s virtually unimaginable that getting vicious will help him in South Carolina, where Trump’s lead has been unassailable, especially not without hurting his medium-term career in Republican politics.

But the most harrowing prospect of all for DeSantis is being ignored—that his inevitable exit will make as small a ripple as Mike Pence’s suspension. Maybe his name will be kept in the headlines by the Trump team, which seems to enjoy trolling DeSantis more than any other candidate. Indeed, in some respects, the pre-post-campaign shaming has already begun. As Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita told me at the Tara House Grill in Nashua, New Hampshire, last night, “They don’t give out participation trophies in the Republican nomination for president.”