For voters in New Hampshire, there is no escape. No matter how disillusioned, disenchanted or plain fed up they are with politics, once every four years, politics will find them. They can cover the television, turn off the radio, unplug the telephone, block the letterbox and nail the door shut. Before you can say “a safer, stronger, freer America” Jeb Bush will be coming down the chimney to proffer a sincere handshake and ask if he can count on their support.

They are used to it, of course, but even by the standards of previous nomination contests, the courtship has been ardent. The candidates and their ‘Super PAC’ surrogates have spent more than $100 million on TV advertising alone, according to analysts Kantar Media. Add in the robocalls, the online pop-ups, the armies of canvassers and the flyers from Ted Cruz saying “vote, or we’ll tell your neighbours,” and it must get awfully wearing.

Bush and his fellow ‘moderates’ Chris Christie and John Kasich have been criss-crossing the state for weeks, making their case in diners and town halls, like schoolboys rolling a small ball of snow in the hope of starting an avalanche. Kasich has rather tepid endorsements from the New York Times and Boston Globe. Bush has money to burn, raised months ago when he was the favourite.

Only one will survive the vote (not literally, although turning the party nomination contest into a Hunger Games style death match would boost political engagement.) After his strong showing in Iowa, the Republican establishment is lining up behind Marco Rubio. As Kasich put it: “If I get smoked in New Hampshire, I’m going home.” Senator Lindsay Graham, a prominent Bush supporter, was equally direct: “If Rubio beats him badly in New Hampshire, Jeb is toast.”

The contrast between what actually happened in Iowa on caucus night and how it was spun in the press was remarkable. On the news, third place was a victory, second place a loss and first place an irrelevance. Cruz, a hardline conservative fluent in the language of faith, won in a state where evangelical Christians make up 63% of the Republican electorate. As fellow religious right candidates Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum won the last two caucuses, this should not have come as a surprise, but it was an impressive victory nonetheless.

To a party establishment desperate to get behind someone, anyone, to beat Cruz and Donald Trump, Rubio’s stronger than expected showing was a raft to cling to. In the New York Times, centre right columnist David Brooks hailed Rubio’s “amazing surge” to almost tie Trump for second place, adding that “the Republican Party usually nominates unifying candidates like Marco Rubio. The laws of gravity have not been suspended. He has a great shot.”

On the betting markets, Rubio’s odds halved overnight. The bookies reckon he now has a 55% chance of winning the nomination. Trump, despite leading in the polls in all of the next states to vote, is rated at just 25%. “Where does Rubio ever win?” wondered Dave Carney, a Republican strategist from New Hampshire, as he digested the results on CNN. It is a legitimate question.

Rubio prospered in Iowa by adopting Trump’s paranoid, intolerant message, telling people “Barack Obama has deliberately weakened America.” On immigration, he backed ever further away from his former support for reform and began framing border control as a matter of national security, as if the USA needs to seal its borders to keep ISIS out.

Having promised to be the candidate of optimism, he fed white working-class resentment, using lines borrowed from Trump’s hymnal: “This country is changing. It feels different. We feel like we're being left behind and left out.” Rubio has such deep religious faith that he attends church twice every weekend (he is Catholic on Saturday and Evangelical on Sunday) so he is almost as good a fit for Iowa as Cruz.

“Rubio isn't a moderate centrist. He's a legitimate, full-throated conservative,” observed right wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, the day after the caucus. “I don't like this idea that we're all of a sudden going to make Rubio the establishment bad guy.” In New Hampshire, where the primary is open to independent voters, the Florida senator has softened his tone, presenting himself as the only candidate capable of beating Hillary Clinton in a general election.

This, in theory, is Bush’s turf, and he will not cede it to his former protege without a fight, despite winning less than three percent of the vote in Iowa. His Super PAC, Right To Rise, has been pounding Rubio relentlessly, and still has $50 million on hand. “It’s like an army in retreat that’s been instructed to burn the bridges, blow up the air fields, destroy everything,” Rubio supporter J. Warren Tompkins told the New York Times.

It is also open season on Trump. Christie has taken to sarcastically hailing him as “Donald the magnificent”. Bush refers to Trump’s “deep insecurity and weakness”.

Former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu simply called him “a loser,” employing the same playground taunt that the Donald levels at his rivals.

Was second place in Iowa really that bad? It depends on why the polls that showed him with a lead on the eve of the caucus were so wrong. Voters that made up their mind at the last-minute overwhelmingly backed Cruz and Rubio, possibly because of Trump’s decision to skip the last Republican debate.

Trump’s ground game was also found wanting. It was recently revealed that the campaign spent more on t-shirts and hats last year than on voter research, and up against the micro-targeted operations run by Cruz and Rubio, this must have cost him - and will presumably continue to.

Or it could be that, as Gallup pointed out last week, he is the most unpopular candidate to run for president, from either party, since pollsters started asking the question. Only 33% of Americans view Trump favourably, and 60% unfavourably, with the rest undecided.

None of this means that he cannot win. Pundits have been predicting the collapse of his campaign since before it began, and have been confounded by the evident desire of conservative voters to stick it to the establishment. Talk show host Laura Ingraham, a Tea Party favourite, pointed out that the candidates unacceptable to the party bosses - Cruz, Trump, Ben Carson and Rand Paul - won a combined 65.8% of the vote in Iowa.

She suggested that Trump and Cruz should call a truce, for the time being, and train their fire on Rubio.

“The establishment is crafty, extremely well financed and supremely well organised. They can still find a way to win, and they are implacably determined to do so,” she wrote.

A month, even a week ago, this might have been feasible, until Cruz began accusing Trump of supporting “socialised medicine” and Trump started wondering aloud why “nobody likes Ted”. The day after the caucuses, he tweeted “Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa, he stole it.” Cruz responded by calling this a “Trumpertantrum” and saying that his primary school aged daughters are better behaved. There will be no ceasefire.

On the Democratic side, debate has scarcely been more civil. At the Bernie Sanders campaign headquarters in Des Moines, supporters chanted “you’re a liar” at the television as Clinton gave her not-quite-victory speech. A generational fissure has opened in the party: Sanders won the backing of 86% of voters under thirty in Iowa, and 58% of voters aged from thirty to forty-four. Clinton won 58% of the next age cohort, from forty-five to sixty-four, and 69% of pensioners.

The messy, inconsistent, error-strewn caucus process, that in a handful of cases awarded county delegates by the flip of a coin, has encouraged conspiracy theories that the result was rigged. A strongly-worded Des Moines Register editorial began: “Once again, the world is laughing at Iowa.”

As with the Republican contest, though, who won the most votes is beside the point. At this stage, perceived victories are much more important, and to that end, both the Sanders and Clinton campaigns have been furiously spinning the outcome.

The case for Sanders can be summed up in a line from his speech: “Nine months ago, we came to this beautiful state. We had no political organisation, we had no money, we had no name recognition, and we were taking on the most powerful political organisation in the United States of America. And, tonight, while the results are still not known, it looks like we are in a virtual tie.” There is no longer any doubt that he poses a serious challenge to Clinton’s once “inevitable” ascension.

The argument that Clinton ‘won’ is a little more complicated, but essentially boils down to the demographics of Iowa, where white liberals, the most reliable Sanders constituency, dominate the Democratic party. New Hampshire is even more favourable terrain for him: the electorate is even whiter and more liberal, and he has represented the next door state, Vermont, his whole career. His double digit lead in the New Hampshire polls reflects this.

Clinton has fond memories of the state. Her husband’s second-placed finish in 1992 was the start of a “comeback kid” narrative that swept him to the White House. In 2008, she defied the polls to win New Hampshire, after a third place finish in Iowa that had called her viability as a candidate into question. Once again, she is sending her surrogates in, and spending heavily, to stave off a loss.

She is also, sensibly, lowering expectations. “I know I am in a contest with your neighbour,” she tells voters. “We are in his backyard.”

Sanders is almost certain to win on Tuesday night, but after that, the map gets trickier for him. Nevada is another caucus state, and both campaigns have been building political organisations there for months to get out the vote on February 20. One in five Democrats in Nevada is Hispanic, a group that Sanders has, to this point, struggled to win over. Clinton has a twenty point lead, but this is old data, from surveys conducted last December.

After that, the campaigns move on to South Carolina, on February 27. Whether or not Sanders can win over black voters could prove to be the defining question of the nomination contest. In the latest polls, four in five African-American Democrats said they would support Clinton.

On Thursday night, at the last Democratic debate before the New Hampshire vote, there were heated exchanges about the nature of progressivism, how to achieve change, whether Obama’s presidency can be described as progressive and whether Clinton can fight rising inequality after taking Wall Street’s money.

The bookies still rate Clinton an astonishing five to one on to win the Democratic nomination - meaning that to win a tenner, you’d have to wager fifty pounds. You can still get seven to two on Sanders, odds that are likely to drop if he wins in New Hampshire as expected. The only sure bet, for Republicans and Democrats alike, is that things are going to get ugly.