House Republicans are meeting tonight to hear from all their candidates who have declared they are running for speaker. It'll be a closed-door meeting, where each of the candidates will make a presentation to the GOP House conference. And this could take awhile, since there are nine names now in the running.

The collapse of Jim Jordan's speaker bid at the end of last week set up this open race. None of the previous candidates is officially running (Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, and Jordan), but all of them would probably accept the nomination, if no other consensus is reached. But for now, they're out of the running (and, honestly, any of them becoming the nominee again is pretty far-fetched at this point).

Here's who is in the running (in alphabetic order): Representatives Jack Bergman, Byron Donalds, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Representatives Kevin Hern, Mike Johnson, Dan Meuser, Gary Palmer, Pete Sessions, and Austin Scott. You can be forgiven if you've never heard of any of them -- the only one I immediately recognized is Sessions (who has been around for a while).

The Washington Post has a full rundown on all nine candidates, but here's a shorter look at where they all fall on the GOP's ideological spectrum:

House Republicans' "five families" are unevenly represented among the speaker candidates.

• All nine are members of the Republican Study Committee, the group that Hern chairs and that Johnson used to chair. (Scalise and Jordan are also former chairmen.)
• Just one, Donalds, is a member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.
• Only one, Meuser, is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, the most moderate family.
• And none belongs to the Republican Governance Group, the caucus of about 40 lawmakers who describe themselves as Republicans' "governing wing."

Just two of them -- Emmer and Scott -- voted to certify Biden's election.

Emmer, Bergman, Meuser, Scott and Sessions voted for the continuing resolution on Sept. 30 that prevented a government shutdown and led Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to seek a vote to oust McCarthy, while Hern, Palmer and Johnson voted against it. (Donalds didn't vote.)

And four of them -- Emmer, Bergman, Scott and Sessions -- voted for more Ukraine aid last month, while the others voted against it. (Just 101 House Republicans voted for the bill, which passed with unanimous Democratic support, while 117 voted against it.)

At this point the consensus seems to be that Tom Emmer is the frontrunner. He's already in Republican leadership as the GOP's Number Three (the whip), which means he already has built relationships across the whole caucus. He'd be a fairly establishment Republican, as opposed to a bomb-thrower like Jordan. He's also the logical choice now that both the GOP's Numbers One and Two (McCarthy and Scalise) are out of the running. Unfortunately for him, Donald Trump and his followers aren't big fans of Emmer. How much Trump will lobby against him is kind of an open question -- as well as how much influence Trump even has in this regard (Trump heavily backed Jordan, but to no avail).

Republicans won't be voting tonight, they'll just be listening to the presentations by all the candidates. Tomorrow, they will meet again behind closed doors and cast secret ballots for the speaker nomination. With nine candidates running, they may need to hold more than one vote, though. To win the nomination requires a simple majority -- half plus one vote -- of the votes. If nobody manages to get that on the first round, then the candidate with the fewest votes will be forced to drop out of the running, and a second vote will be held. If there is still no one with a majority, the process happens again. Eventually, even with a perfectly divided conference, this will lead to a vote with only two candidates, where one or the other of them mathematically has to get a majority. But it likely won't get that far (that would be the eighth round of voting, if it happens), since one or the other of them will likely convince a majority to vote for them before things go on that long.

But that, as we all know, is just the first step of the process. Once a nominee has been selected (no matter how long it takes) within the GOP conference, they will have to try to get 217 votes (or slightly fewer, with absences) together to win the speakership on the House floor. This means convincing all but four Republicans to publicly vote for the speaker nominee -- which hasn't happened yet, ever since McCarthy was deposed.

There are multiple factions within the Republican Party, some more reasonable than others. They'll all have to get on board with the candidate to garner enough support to win the House floor vote. And, as we've all seen, all it takes is five Republicans to hold firm to prevent anyone from becoming speaker.

The big question will likely be whether this all plays out in public or in private. Perhaps the new GOP speaker candidate will hold closed-door caucus meetings until they get a vote of confidence that adds up to 217 or better. This was the path Steve Scalise was going to take -- nail down enough support before calling for a floor vote. Or perhaps it'll play out in public, as it did with Jim Jordan -- probably with a humiliating first vote that falls short, followed by a lot of dealmaking and arm-twisting to try to get enough holdouts on board.

The fastest all of this could happen would be if we got an actual speaker some time tomorrow. If the GOP intraparty vote produces a candidate on the first ballot, that would be a real show of strength. If they then hold a vote to gauge how many floor votes they'll get and everyone decides they've had enough of all the drama and they all unite behind the candidate, then they could quickly move to the floor for a vote (perhaps by tomorrow evening). With enough support already lined up, only one floor vote would be necessary, and the House could get back to business by Wednesday morning.

That's the fastest it could all happen, of course. The slowest it could happen is rather open-ended, since we're already almost three weeks into this crisis. Another week or two of squabbling isn't out of the question, to put it mildly.

Many in the party must know what all of this is doing to them in terms of public perception. Republican disunity has been on full display for weeks now, and it is of epic and embarrassing proportions. The House Republicans keep proving that they cannot govern. So there might be a growing fatigue within the caucus for all the drama and brinksmanship we've experienced up to this point. But again -- it only takes five of them digging their heels in to derail anyone's chances.

Even if we do have a new speaker tomorrow night, the critical point is going to be whether they also decide to change the rules or not. If they leave them as they are, then any one member can attempt a coup against the sitting speaker at any time. And if they can get four other GOP members to vote with them, they can kick the speaker out of his chair again. If this rule remains, then there will be a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of any Republican speaker. And we'll all look back at all this chaos as just being the first round of the whole fight.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant