A few frozen Iowa nights should trim the field in a couple of months... ;-)
Dec of 2003—visting my dad on Cape Cod. A Democrat, he said to me, “Well, there’s no way Dean’s gonna win it now...” Because Saddam had just been captured; it was on the news.
He was the apparent frontrunner at the time. Dean scream came in January...(My dad, who died in ‘14, was right about Dean...but the capture of Saddam was only part of it)
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a41615/the-dean-scream-oral-history/
>>MELE: Howard, as the frontrunner, came under concerted attack from all parties in the 90 days prior to Iowa and New Hampshire. You had Kerry and Gephardt and Edwards, and you had shadowy PACs with a lot of money.
JOE TRIPPI, Campaign Manager: The other candidates were on conference calls every day to decide how to coordinate attacking us. That’s been documented.
>>DEAN: One of the things we did wrong, which I didn’t know about at the time, was go after Gephardt. In a multiple-way race, if two people start fighting, they both go down. And we both did. That was a mistake, and unfortunately I didn’t know about it. I mean, I didn’t know what was on TV, because by that time the campaign was in some chaos.