There are two ways to look at all this, depending on your perception of what’s happening in the Republican Party. A lot of political handicappers — particularly those on the left, who tend to view the Republican base as monolithic and somewhat medieval — doubt that Huntsman can even win enough delegates to earn himself a decent speaking slot at the convention. My colleague Nate Silver, who blogs his statistical analysis for The Times, has argued that Huntsman has no more than a remote chance of scoring the nomination. Skeptics point out that not only did Huntsman go to work for a Democratic president, but he also sent warm letters to that president, calling him a “remarkable leader.” Huntsman believes in the science of climate change, and he favors civil unions for gay couples and leniency for the children of illegal immigrants. In a Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month, only 35 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said they had heard of him — but that was the good news. Of those who said they had heard of him, 36 percent said there was no chance he’d win their vote.

Some of the more sober-minded Republican insiders in Washington and New Hampshire, though, persuaded me that by distancing himself from some of the party’s more populist influences, Huntsman was giving Republican and independent voters an option that could not be so easily dismissed. This judgment has little to do with data and more to do with what Huntsman calls the vacuum in the Republican field, which at this point looks to be more unsettled than at any time in at least a half century. Having been largely wiped out in statewide races in 2006 and again in 2008, Republicans haven’t developed the kind of “bench” — young governors and senators in waiting — you would normally want to have heading into a promising election year. And some of the party’s brighter stars (Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, John Thune), perhaps wary of an incumbent president who hopes to raise $1 billion, have taken a pass on 2012.

The result is a field of presidential candidates who strike a lot of Republicans, perhaps unfairly, as better vice presidential candidates — or, worse, as the vehicles of a less tolerant, more conspiratorial strain of Republicanism that threatens to overrun the party. In New Hampshire, and probably in other states, too, early converts to Huntsman’s cause are traditional activists who want someone to steer them past the Tea Party moment, rather than into it. In a conversation with Huntsman at a private dinner for his early backers in New Hampshire, I heard Paul Collins, an influential operative, summarize the feeling this way: “When I signed on, someone said to me, ‘Oh, you’ve met Huntsman?’ And I said: ‘No. But I’ve met all the other guys!’ ”

The undisputed front-runner in the field is Mitt Romney, who finished third (just behind Mike Huckabee) in 2008 and has been running ever since, contributing to county-level campaigns in New Hampshire and campaigning for local candidates as if he were hoping to win an appointment to the lottery commission. But in a party with a long and much remarked-upon tradition of closing ranks behind the guy who’s next in line, Romney’s perch seems unusually precarious, and not only because the health care plan he championed in Massachusetts looks a lot like the one his party wants to repeal in Washington.

While he may be the closest thing to an assumed nominee the party has right now, Romney isn’t the kind of reassuring presence toward which Republicans normally gravitate. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole and John McCain had all been national figures for decades before they secured the nomination by establishment acclaim; by contrast, Romney served a single term as governor of a Democratic state. And if the Tea Party movement proved anything last year, it was that Republican voters in the digital age aren’t inclined to stamp their approval on a candidate just because their leaders or the news media expect them to. “We’re no longer a hierarchical party,” Weaver told me, brandishing his ubiquitous BlackBerry. “That’s what this achieved.”

It’s common for analysts to talk about presidential fields in terms of “first tier” and “second tier” candidates, but it might be more instructive to divide this year’s Republican class into insurgents on one hand and alternatives to Romney on the other. The insurgents, who make up the majority of the field, will run as Tea Party-inspired ideologues, and they will compete principally in Iowa, where social conservatives abound. (No Republican candidate in the modern era has ever won both Iowa and New Hampshire in a contested primary season, and Romney clearly intends to stake his claim in New England.) The alternatives, meanwhile, will present themselves to mainstream Republican voters as being just as electable and experienced as the front-runner, only maybe more likeable or with more conviction.

The most logical alternative at this early point might be Pawlenty, a young, stolid Midwestern sort, with an appealing calmness and a willingness to tack sharply right when he needs to. But Pawlenty is in something of a geographic box; because he’s from Minnesota, he will be expected to run strong in Iowa, and this means that he’ll be stuck campaigning there for a lot of the fall, while Romney gallivants around New Hampshire talking about his turnaround skills. And while Pawlenty has worked New Hampshire hard this year, the state’s voters, for whatever reason, seem less than enthralled at this point. “He’s been doing everything right in every traditional New Hampshire way, but he’s also been doing it for 12 months, and he doesn’t have a lot to show for it,” Fergus Cullen, a former state party chairman, told me. “The voters just keep shopping.”