In every respect but one, Iowa’s Republican caucuses delivered a conventional result on Tuesday. In 2008, Iowan churchgoers laid hands on an affable rock guitarist, Mike Huckabee. This time, they have lifted up the much less likable Rick Santorum. In any event, the corporate-funded wing of the Party will now muster its financing, polling, and ad-making machine to assure the nomination of its candidate, Mitt Romney. It would be very surprising if it failed.

The unconventional aspect was the vote for Ron Paul. After raising expectations high, Paul finished a close-run third in Iowa, so his media momentum may slip. And yet never before has a candidate running on such a radical, and specifically libertarian platform—abolish the Federal Reserve, withdraw from all foreign entanglements, end the war on drugs—done so well. The size and character of his vote suggest his candidacy will matter right until November. His supporters included many young people, out-of-state volunteers, and cyber-activists. They are not going to melt away. Yet they are not going to secure the Republican nomination for their man, either. What, then?

This looks like an election cycle ripe for small-party or third-party candidates. The bases of both main parties include unusually large numbers of disillusioned voters. Movements like the Tea Party and the Occupy groups have already constructed networks that small-party candidates could adapt and synthesize with sections of Ron Paul’s base.

In this post-Citizens United era, in which corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals are free to spend unlimited amounts of money to support their mainstream candidates, it would be hard for such candidates to do anywhere near as well nationally in November as Paul did on Tuesday in Iowa. But they could nonetheless tip the election, most likely in favor of President Obama, by drawing off votes in swing states that might otherwise go to Romney.

Obama versus Romney looks, from this admittedly great and unpredictable distance, like it will be a close-run thing. Ralph Nader’s vote in Florida in 2000, which arguably cost Al Gore the Presidency, is a reminder that even relatively small numbers of disenfranchised-feeling but mobilized voters can decide close Presidential races—and it’s not the only one.

In 2008, Obama’s margin of victory over John McCain in North Carolina was 14,177 votes. The Libertarian Party won 25,722 votes in North Carolina that year. In Colorado, where small-party candidates can access the ballot relatively easily, the Libertarians, the Constitution Party, the Greens, and others took just under two per cent of the vote altogether. In Florida, Obama’s margin over McCain in 2008 was 236,450 votes—and that was in an election with maximally favorable conditions for Obama. The total small-party vote—pre-Occupy, pre-Tea Party—was 63,046.

There are two nominating conventions scheduled before the end of June that will help determine how Ron Paul’s followers, as well as other disenchanted voters, might make themselves felt in November. The first is the Libertarian Party’s convention, to be held in Las Vegas in May. Paul ran for President as a Libertarian in 1988, in between his stints as a Republican member of Congress. He told CNN recently, “I have no intention of doing that. No plans, and no desire. Flat out, I don’t want to.” That sounds pretty clear, but he will come under pressure to reconsider, especially if the Republican establishment angers him or his followers by, say, refusing to provide him with a prime-time speaking slot at the Party’s convention, in Tampa.

If Paul did run again as a Libertarian, he would surely exceed the Party’s best-ever performance in a Presidential election of about a million votes nationally, in 1980, another year of discontent. (The candidate was Ed Clark.) Carla Howell, the Party’s executive director, told me this week that Libertarian Party will qualify for the general-election ballot in virtually all states—“the high forties, if not fifty”—and there is good reason to think it could.

Even if Paul demurs, the Party is likely to nominate in Vegas a more appealing candidate, and to muster a more effective organizing effort online and in the field, than it did in 2008, when the Libertarians brought forward, on the convention’s sixth ballot, Bob Barr, the right-wing former Republican congressman from Georgia, whose distinctions include wearing what may be the least attractive mustache in American politics. Gary Johnson, a two-term Republican governor of New Mexico (another prospective battleground state in an Obama-Romney contest), has already declared he will compete for the Libertarian nomination in 2012. Some of Paul’s organization could move Johnson’s way.

Then there is the strange entity called Americans Elect, which has a reported thirty-million-dollar budget bankrolled, in part, by a former Drexel Burnham junk-bond trader, Peter Ackerman. (Americans Elect has declined to disclose the names of other of its funders.) The organization’s brain trust, which includes a number of technologists, has come up with a convoluted plan for an online convention that will nominate, by the end of June, a cross-party ticket for President and Vice-President. The competing slates would each have to be approved by a vetting committee made up of William Webster, the former Republican F.B.I. and C.I.A. director; Larry Diamond, a Democratic political scientist at Stanford University; and James A. Thomson, a former president of the RAND Corporation. (If the committee disapproved, a majority of online delegates could overrule it.)

Ileana Wachtel, a spokeswoman for the group, told me that so far about 430,000 registered voters have signed up as delegates for the upcoming virtual convention. New delegates will be free to register until a week before the last ballot of the online convention, opening the door to late-breaking momentum campaigns from passionate online communities of one sort or another. Americans Elect hopes to qualify its candidate for the general election ballot in all fifty states; so far it has qualified in thirteen, including California.

The founders of Americans Elect evidently hope to bring forward a centrist, good-government-style ticket. In an election where it already seems most likely that a Harvard Law School graduate will square off against a Harvard Business School graduate, the appeal of such a technocratic ticket is not obvious. The group’s online convention may yet produce an outcome much more Libertarian-flavored than the organizers originally imagined, and by then it will be too late to do anything about the ballot positions it has won. Currently, of all the political figures “tracked” by the delegates online, Ron Paul has the most declared followers.

This has been a strange and entertaining election cycle so far. It is completely understandable that campaign reporters like my colleague Ryan Lizza would fear that over the next several months, without 9-9-9 or “Oops” or Newt-and-Callista, the campaign will grow dull.

We don’t feel done with strange yet, however. The autumn’s weirdness in the Republican contest was mainly of the sort conceived by Hollywood’s cynical reality-show producers and their complicit contestants: a theatre of vanity, ambition, and inadequate self-knowledge lit harshly by cable-network klieg lights. What lies ahead is likely to be another sort of weirdness, from the bottom up, to be delivered by the country’s disoriented, pissed-off electorate. More than a fifth of Iowa’s Republican caucus-goers stood for Ron Paul, a seventy-six-year-old man who fears inflation, loves gold, and wants to decriminalize marijuana. Those voters represent millions more. One way or another, we will hear from them again.

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.