Cruelest..

The cruelest month of the 2016 race

October poses serious risks for many contenders, but presents opportunities for a few.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

October is when the 2016 campaign gets real.

Two debates are coming — one that will likely winnow the GOP field and one that could rearrange the Democratic race. A Benghazi hearing will either be a showcase or a feeding frenzy. And campaign fundraising reports are going to be making a lot of decisions for people, whether they like it or not.

It’s showtime for Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, who were supposed to be on glide paths by now. It’s also put up or shut up time for Joe Biden — and if the answer is yes, the time to find out whether the public polls he’s been solely relying on to gauge the race bear any relation to reality, or if the bottom will drop out as soon as he goes from potential to actual candidate.

“We've got a long time between now and the caucuses in February, so this is a fight that's just getting started,” said Haley Morris, a spokeswoman for former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who perhaps has the most to gain from the Democratic race finally becoming real enough to get him on stage next to Clinton.

By Nov. 1, this race is going to look seismically different — like Pangaea breakup level different.

It begins today, when campaigns begin sharing their financial filings and staffers at the weakest outfits start sending out emails to land new jobs before the stories of their boss’ demise break.

Hillary Clinton's disclosure will show $28 million in cash raised, a haul that bumps her six-month total to an impressive $75 million. But Bernie Sanders' $24 million in funds collected will be too close for comfort, fueling Democratic anxieties that she’s still not dominant enough. Meanwhile, she’ll have almost every other problem to deal with.

On Oct. 13, she’ll walk on stage in Las Vegas to face her competition on national television. She's a proven strong debater, but this forum is so much about managing expectations that even an exceptional performance might leave critics conceding only that she hadn't embarrassed herself. And one week later, on Oct. 22, she’ll head to Washington to testify about her email server before the House Benghazi committee, which Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, likely the next speaker, has now either undercut by acknowledging the investigation is about pulling down her numbers or fueled by encouraging Republicans to let loose now that the pretenses are gone.

Poll after poll will come, showing how much support there seems to be for the candidate considered Anyone But Hillary, and she’ll finish the month at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Des Moines under the specter of an Iowa race that seems somehow to be slipping away to Bernie Sanders.

Plus, she’ll probably have to deal with all of this still not knowing what Biden’s up to. Or when. Or how.

Even with all that, Jeb Bush has more than enough reason to be jealous of how easy Clinton might have it. The former Florida governor’s finally going on the air with his first ads; this is make-or-break time after months of collecting a lot more money than percentage points to prove he’s not just Scott Walker with a more famous last name. There’s only so far blaming Donald Trump for sucking up the attention can go, and at some point he’s going to have to look like a candidate actually running to win the nomination rather than justto get it by default because he’s got the bank account to outlast everyone else.

At least Bush knows he’ll be on stage at the next Republican debate in Colorado. Most of the remaining 15 Republicans won’t, at least by the current numbers: CNBC did accede Wednesday to hosting an undercard debate on Oct. 28 — candidates will need just a 3 percent average to get onto the main stage — but they’ll need to be hitting 1 percent to get on the undercard. At this point, that could conceivably mean Rand Paul, if he doesn’t make the prime-time debate cut, would be the only candidate at the back of the pack hitting that threshold, and he’s having his own problems keeping his campaign together.

For many Republican campaigns, the question for the next four weeks is going to become who’ll actually make it to the debate, and who will survive without some kind of spectacular breakout performance. Along with Paul, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie will need to find some time to shine or start working on their scrapbooks to remember those crazy couple of weeks when they actually thought they could run for president this cycle.

The big donors will gather, like the people who brought picnic lunches to watch the First Battle of Bull Run. They’ll be watching the trend lines — mostly Bush’s, but those of Marco Rubio and a few others too. Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer, Joe Ricketts (now that Walker’s out) and a few others are big enough names with big enough bank accounts to transform a Republican campaign if they were to get in.

Permeating everything is Trump. As has been true for the past two months, everything anybody knows about politics should point to him collapsing — except for the fact that he hasn’t yet. Signs of fatigue do seem to be starting to show, and Trump is fighting hard against them, mostly by making moves to show how real and mature a candidate he is, like the tax plan he put out Monday. He’ll have to hope that doesn’t turn off supporters who rushed to him precisely because they were more interested in street fighting and hat slogans than the long list of boring things politicians running for president tend to talk about.

Meanwhile, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson are about to start finding out whether people who aren’t political reporters and pundits think they’re having “moments.”

Then there’s Biden. Saturday, he’ll come as close as he has so far to going up against Clinton directly, when she speaks at a breakfast event for the Human Rights Campaign and he delivers the keynote address over dinner to the group that night, soaking up the love from many LGBT activists who credit him with pushing President Barack Obama into endorsing gay marriage.

Every raindrop from Hurricane Joaquin is another reminder that the deadline he kept saying would be the end of summer has come and gone.

Wednesday, the New Hampshire secretary of state gave him a new one: If he wants to run in the first-in-the-nation primary, he’s got to file paperwork by Nov. 20.

Biden’s been floating on a bubble of goodwill so far. If he waits until then, there’s not going to be much left.