The New Hampshire primary tomorrow should be interesting.

As I often say, wherever you have large stakes, an opportunity for wrong-doing, and a small risk of getting caught, wrong-doing happens. That’s a universal law of human awfulness. When humans CAN cheat, they do. Or at least enough of them do.

That situation describes the primaries. I assume the primaries are corrupt to some degree. If not, that would mean the primaries are the one thing in history that has escaped the universal law of human awfulness. And that seems a stretch.

Maybe you think cheating in a primary – and not getting caught – is too hard to do. I scoff at that notion. “Too hard” just means you don’t personally know how to do it. But someone knows. Someone always does.

Now here’s the interesting part. If the hypothetical fixers in the GOP establishment can fix New Hampshire, they have a big decision to make about how far to go. If they don’t fix the race, or they fix it only a little, Trump will win big and he might be unstoppable. You can’t have that if you are the establishment fixers.

But after Iowa, lots of folks are watching for irregularities. And after Rubio’s recent debate failure, there is no natural reason to expect Rubio (the establishment’s candidate) to have another “surprise” surge as he did in Iowa. That would be too obvious. So the fixers (if such people exist) can either lose the White House or risk getting caught by making too large a fix. Which way would they go?

The answer is that they would go for the big fix and risk detection. And the reason for that choice is that the people at the top are not the ones who will go to jail if the fix is detected. The people at risk are the low-level operatives. The people ordering the fix (if such people exist) will have deniability and a lot to gain. That group will influence their underlings to accept the high risk of detection.

I also wonder if it is illegal to rig a primary. Is the Republican Party a private organization or public? If private, there might be no law against fixing the election. But I don’t know how that works with quasi-public groups like political parties.

Prediction: Look for Rubio to have a surprisingly strong second-place showing in New Hampshire. And look for the most common explanations for that surprise to be his momentum from Iowa.

I assume that most of you think this is conspiracy talk and not to be taken seriously. Some of you will feel sorry for me as I squander the remaining crumbs of my credibility on this foolishness. But keep in mind that you said the same thing in September when I was predicting Trump’s rise.