As Friday’s debate demonstrated, the candidates each possess significant strengths and weaknesses that make them by turns attractive and suspect as potential nominees. Joe Biden is a familiar, comfortable presence with decades of experience. He can be decisive in pitching his health care idea and his foreign policy chops; he also can begin a sentence leaving his supporters with averted glances as they fear where that sentence will careen into a ditch. More substantively, his explanation for his support for the Iraq War scores very low on the candor scale. He was far more supportive than he now asserts.

Pete Buttigieg has done remarkably well for a 38-year-old former mayor of a middling size town, with the look of a student body president. He makes the same pitch as three of the last four Democratic presidents. Just as 43-year-old JFK exemplified “a new generation of Americans,” just as 46-year-old Bill Clinton told us “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,” and just as 46-year-old Barack Obama said he wanted to move politics beyond “fights that were taking place back in dorm rooms in the ’60s” so Buttigieg urges Americans to “turn the page” because “this is a moment where the next president is going to face challenges the likes of which we hadn’t even thought of a few years or decades ago.” But the record he offers is substantively thin—a liability Biden’s new online ad mocks with ferocity. And there is still the issue of how his marriage will resonate in the general election.

Amy Klobuchar has proven herself the consensus winner of the debates. She blends mastery of the issues with an unruffled, easygoing presence leavened by humor that is—or appears to be—spontaneous. But Klobuchar has scored well in a series of debates—and yet she finished fifth in Iowa and hasn't reached higher than third place in the latest New Hampshire polls.

Elizabeth Warren “won” the 2019 phase of the primary season, garnering praise for her detailed plans and her up-by-her-bootstraps biography. She passed Bernie Sanders in the polls, becoming the progressives’ favorite. But her appeal withered when her Medicare for All proposal came under fire—moderates seem to have been scared off by the price tag, while progressives seem to fear that she is not committed enough to the issue.

As for Sanders, he built a dedicated army of followers and a massive fund-raising machine by promising to create a “political revolution” that will sweep his proposals for universal health care, free college tuition, national rent control and a revived union movement into reality. But Sanders has shown no ability to expand his support, and while his fellow Democrats have avoided probing the nature of his “democratic socialism,” the concern—more like panic—among more moderate Democrats suggests that it is not just Wall Street billionaires who fear his candidacy. (What was Sanders doing in 1980 running as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party, which followed the teachings of Leon Trotsky and proudly proclaimed itself the legitimate voice of Marxism-Leninism?)

At one point, Democrats might have hoped that New Hampshire would clarify this contest, culling the field and narrowing the choice in the primaries to come. As of now, betting the farm, or even a small parcel of the back forty, on that outcome seems like a risk. Even the likely also-rans, Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang have no incentive to quit the race. Steyer is still counting on a wave of support from South Carolina’s black voters, and Yang just seems to be having too much fun.

The same circumstances that produced a virtual tie in Iowa could lead to an inconclusive result on Tuesday. Sometimes New Hampshire produces decisive results: John McCain beat George W. Bush in 2000 by 18 points; John Kerry beat Dick Gephardt in 2004 by 10. But other times, a crowded field can lead to a less impressive “victory.” Pat Buchanan won in 1996 with 27 percent of the vote, besting Bob Dole by one point. Hillary Clinton beat Obama in 2008 by 2 1/2 points. Gerald Ford beat Ronald Reagan in 1976 by 1 1/2 points. The news media will crown a “winner” no matter the margin, but a photo finish could lead to a “comeback kid” argument, like the one that Bill Clinton used to turn a 9-point loss in New Hampshire into a 1992 “victory.”

So what should we expect? New Hampshire has something of a history of last-minute turns. In 1984, eight days after winning barely a third of Walter Mondale’s vote in Iowa Gary Hart emerged with a 10-point victory in the nation’s first primary. In 2008, Hillary Clinton surprised even her own campaign by defeating Obama in New Hampshire. There is simply no way of knowing whether Klobuchar’s debate will make a major difference on Tuesday—late polls suggest it might—or whether Biden’s very tough attack on Buttigieg’s thin résumé will draw or repel voters, or whether last-minute voting shifts among more moderate candidates will continue to divide their support and give Sanders a measurable victory.

Watching the frenetic last-minute attempts to game out this primary tempts me into wondering whether there may be a massive write-in vote for Michael Bloomberg. (After all, didn’t Henry Cabot Lodge win the 1964 GOP primary as a write-in? Yes, but that was only after a highly organized campaign; so never mind.) A plausible result would be a measurable Sanders win that marks him as the semi-official frontrunner, with a former vice president hanging on by a thread, a centrist-moderate wing of the party in full meltdown, a mayor of a midsize Indiana town fighting to become that wing’s hope, and an ex-mayor of New York wondering whether it’s time to add more chips to his billion-dollar bet.

That would suggest two strong possibilities after Tuesday: The first is that Sanders piles up delegates through Super Tuesday and beyond, giving him enough of a plurality to make his nomination inevitable, with wholesale gnashing of teeth and rending of garments among the centrists. The second—and I know we say this every four years but this time there’s a plausible chance that it really, really could happen—is that three or four candidates gain enough delegates through the party's proportional rules to keep all of them in the hunt throughout the summer.

The prospect of a genuine contested convention—distant, but looming larger on the horizon—will gladden the hearts of an army of journalists, not to mention the White House.