[I begin with a technical note. I couldn't use the obvious title for today's article, since Politico already ran this story using the go-to phrase: "Spoiler Alert?" and I didn't want to be a copycat....]

Polling for the likeliest of general election matchups this far out -- almost exactly one year until people actually get to vote for president next November -- cannot be seen as definitive, but it also cannot be brushed aside as irrelevant (since it's pretty obvious at this point that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are going to wind up winning the two major parties' nominations). But it won't actually be just a two-man contest, since there will be other names on the ballot, in what is likely to be enough states to make a big difference. Both Robert F. Kennedy Junior and Cornel West have announced they are going to be running as independents, and who knows who the Green Party or the nascent No Labels effort will decide to nominate? At the very least, there may be four names for voters to choose from. Perhaps even five or six.

Most of the polling to date hasn't reflected this -- at least not yet. But the polls which do exist so far show that Kennedy, in particular, could be a spoiler on the order of H. Ross Perot -- who, in his first third-party bid for the presidency in 1992 raked in a whopping 19 percent of the popular vote. That is more than just a marginal effect, obviously.

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Boo!

It is time once again, goblins and ghouls, to offer up some frightening political horror stories for both sides of the aisle. As in years past, we have brewed up a witches' cauldron of fearful spine-tingling tales to scare the pants right off you, no matter where you dwell on the political spectrum.

And, as promised, there will be pumpkins! We have carved two jack o'lanterns to fit each chilling tale, although we do admit that the second one was rather hard to think up an actual image for (we went with California, although upon reflection maybe we should have carved a train... or a snarling dog's face...).

As I've stated for the past few years, these days it is actually kind of hard to dream up scenarios that are both more frightening and more outlandish than what we now see on a regular basis from Washington D.C. But we did our best, so please sit back, ignore the sound of chains clanking and banshees screaming, and peruse this year's terrible tales.

Republican Nightmare -- The Curse

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson makes it through his first few weeks mainly by keeping his caucus happy by passing all sorts of far-right bills (that will go nowhere in the Senate). But then the budget deadline nears.

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Mike Pence surprised everyone this weekend, when he abruptly announced he was ending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination during a speech Pence gave in Las Vegas. The surprise wasn't that Pence's presidential ambitions were doomed -- anyone with half a brain could see that from the get-go -- but that Pence had actually realized it himself, this early in the process. Personally, I knew from the day he announced that Mike Pence was never going to win the Republican nomination -- not even if Donald Trump had suddenly decided not to run. Even without Trump in the race, Pence would still have been doomed. His flavor of Republicanism is a thing of the past, he has an incredibly bland and smarmy personality (he really deserves to have Trump hit him for being "sanctimonious," much more than Ron DeSantis), and he enraged the MAGA crowd by not following the Dear Leader's order to somehow wave a magic wand and overturn the results of the 2020 election on January 6th. Add all of that up and it equals a big defeat from the Republican voting base, plain and simple. So watching the coverage of the development on yesterday's morning political-chatfest shows wasn't any real surprise (other than the early timing of it). What was a surprise (for me, at least) this Sunday morning was to see Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed (for some unfathomable reason) on NBC's Meet The Press.

Since I am already in a rather fantastical frame of mind, trying to dream up two Hallowe'en nightmares for tomorrow's column (and carve pumpkins for both!), and after reading a quick review of Arnie's appearance this morning, I started pondering alternate political universes. So you'll have to excuse me for the purely speculative nature of today's column. Here is my flight of fancy in a nutshell: consider, if you will, what would have happened if Schwarzenegger had been eligible to run for president.

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After three weeks of junior-high-school levels of adolescent slap-fighting, Republicans in the House of Representatives finally (!) chose a speaker. Was this largely due to fatigue at how tawdry the whole clown show was, or was it the fear that some moderate members were actually considering working with Democrats to come up with a solution? We'll never know, but we certainly are glad it's over. For now, that is. The rule on the "motion to vacate" hasn't changed, so while Speaker Mike Johnson seems to be enjoying something of a honeymoon period with even the furthest-right of his caucus, things could always go south for him, since all it would take would be five disgruntled Republicans to kick him out too. And disgruntled is what MAGA extremists do best, so we'll have to see whether this comes to pass or not in the weeks ahead.

Feelings ran high throughout all of this, of course. Think that "junior-high-school" comment was too much? Well, maybe so -- we may be giving Republicans too much credit. This seems worthy of an elementary school playground, actually:

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There are plenty of metaphors to choose from when describing what newly-anointed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is now going to have to face: a Gordian knot, threading a needle, walking a tightrope, squaring a circle, and the ever-popular herding of cats. Whatever image you choose, it all boils down to a near-impossible task -- perhaps with one very narrow solution, perhaps not. That's what Johnson now faces, with his boisterous House Republicans. The past three weeks of clown show hasn't changed the basic dynamic of this situation.

House Republicans want to pass their own individual budget bills (the 12 appropriations bills that make up the federal budget) and then they want the Democratic Senate and the Democratic president to somehow just shrug their shoulders and agree to it all. But there are a few obvious problems with fulfilling this desire, chief among them the fact that Democrats are just not going to do that, period. But let's set even that aside for the moment.

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The breaking political news today is that we finally (!) have a new speaker of the House. However, I have been so immersed in this story for the past three weeks that I'm going to take this opportunity to step back from the House GOP drama club for a day and focus on another story that's also been developing quickly. We'll all have plenty of time to discuss newly-sworn-in Speaker Mike Johnson in the days and weeks to come, after all.

While all of this has been playing out in Washington, Donald Trump has been sinking slowly into his various legal quagmires. The most prominent example comes from Georgia, where a total of four of his co-defendants have now turned state's evidence, accepted rather lenient plea deals, and pleaded guilty to various charges. This leaves 14 co-defendants who have not flipped yet -- but still could. That's a lot of other shoes that could drop, obviously (and some of them are very big shoes indeed).

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House Republicans, in a whirlwind of chaos today, first elected a nominee to be speaker and then refused to give him the support he would have needed -- so he dropped out. It was a head-snapping day for politics-watchers, that's for sure.

For those of you who weren't glued to the news feeds today, I will try to give a play-by-play rundown of what just transpired. The short answer is: Tom Emmer won the Republican nomination for speaker of the House on the last possible round of voting, only to withdraw his nomination four hours later after realizing there were around two dozen Republicans who would never vote for him on the House floor. Which leaves us right back where we were three weeks ago on October 4th -- a speakerless House and a Republican conference that has zero party unity and no acknowledged leadership whatsoever.

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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).

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Today, Republicans crossed the Jordan. That would be Jim Jordan, and enough of them crossed him in a third House speaker vote that the party as a whole has now completely crossed him off the list. Jordan is no longer the Republican "speaker-designee," instead he's just "Representative Jordan" again. And yet the Republicans are still nowhere near their Promised Land (to complete that metaphor) -- they're still out there somewhere, wandering in the wilderness.

Where do House Republicans go next? They don't have a clue. They'll think about it over the weekend and then get back together Monday night to hold another closed-door meeting to nominate another poor sap to try to become speaker. Maybe it'll be one of the previous selections? Kevin McCarthy or Steve Scalise certainly don't seem far-fetched, at least at this point. But it could be someone new as well. Lots of people could run, who knows?

Republicans who gain control of the House are always like the dog who actually caught the car he's been chasing, because they simply don't know what to do with it. They just don't. This GOP civil war has been simmering for decades now, between those who actually do understand the way Congress works and those who just want to burn it all down. Jordan was the ultimate "burn it down" guy, and he just failed badly in his bid to take over the whole House Republican caucus. So this ideological battle will continue to rage, one assumes, right up to the point where the public gets so disgusted by their antics and their general ineptitude that they hand control of the chamber back to the Democrats.

House Republicans are, in a word, ungovernable. They cannot even get their own act together, much less set a political agenda for the rest of the country. This entire three-week saga has been nothing short of proof that Republicans should not be let anywhere near the levers of political power in this country, since all they truly excel at is smashing the machinery in rage.

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We're all currently experiencing the punchline of an old political joke -- the one that says Republicans really should be honest in their campaign slogans, by running on: "Government doesn't work -- elect us and we'll prove it!" Here we are, living that proof.

The House of Representatives does not have an elected Republican leader. Republicans control a majority of the seats, but it is such a slim majority that any five of them deciding to throw a monkey wrench into the works paralyzes the entire party. At the beginning of this month, a giant monkey wrench was indeed thrown, as eight Republicans managed to dethrone their own speaker. Since that point, chaos has reigned in the House, and it doesn't seem like sanity is going to prevail any time soon.

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