In a little less than a month the Republican presidential nomination process will begin with the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3 and New Hampshire primary elections on Jan. 10. While these dates are well before the actual 2012 presidential election in November, I’m actually glad the nominations will begin this soon simply because it will start to weed out candidates in the Republican field so that many of them will hopefully fade into irrelevance.

I’ve seen some pretty wild presidential elections over the past few years, but I think this one might take the cake. We’ve had some familiar faces like Mitt Romney and Ron Paul (and there’s probably a good reason why neither of them gained the nomination in 2008), we’ve had contenders representing the Tea Party fringe of the Republican wing like Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, and we’ve had candidates who are actually sane that stand no chance of being elected (sorry John Huntsman).

Then there are all the candidates that won’t be getting the nomination. Tim Pawlenty got out months ago, but I’m not sure anyone even remembered he was running. And then on Saturday the Cain Train officially derailed. I think The Onion summed things up best in one of their weekend headlines: “Rumors of extramarital affair end campaign of presidential candidate who didn’t know China has nuclear weapons.”

And finally, there are the candidates that chose to never get into the race at all. Republican party leaders must have cried for weeks when Chris Christie formally announced he wasn’t getting into the race since he’s likely one of the most viable choices the party has. And what of Sarah Palin? Here she spends the past three years peddling her books and her politics on all the major news networks but she still never chose to get in. Maybe we’ll get to look forward to her following in her daughter’s footsteps on “Dancing with the Stars” sometime in the near future.

So who does that leave us with? Well, for the time being it looks like Mitt Romney is always going to be polling around 20 percent, but Newt Gingrich has been polling a lot better in the past few weeks and it looks like he stands to benefit the most from Herman Cain dropping out of the race. Some people think that Rick Perry might have a resurgence of his own in coming weeks as voters desperately seek out someone besides Mitt Romney, but if our governor keeps making mistakes like forgetting that the voting age is 18 rather than 21, I think his campaign might be as good as over.

Some Republicans decry Gingrich for not being conservative enough. If that means that he’s actually a rationally minded politician who knows how to forge a compromise, I really can’t say I’d be too opposed to him being in charge. Also, we know that Gingrich won’t run into a lot of the same problems Cain did simply because all of his own extramarital affairs became public years ago. He has few skeletons in his closet and can’t exactly be counted on for a good scandal anymore.

Barney Frank recently said that he didn’t think he’d “lived a good enough life to see Newt Gingrich as the Republican nominee for President.” Democrats ought to be careful with that sort of hubris; the next election is certainly still up in the air, and if President Obama hopes to win he’s going to have to have a more solid strategy than simply wishing that his opposition is so polarizing it will force voters to pick him instead.

Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits The Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]