PREDICTION: EVERY MAINSTREAM MEDIA OUTLET IS GOING TO DECLARE 3RD-PLACE RUBIO THE IOWA WINNER

The RealClear Politics Iowa average still has Marco Rubio trailing Donald Trump in Iowa by double digits, andtrailing Ted Cruz, by 7, but if a couple of recent Iowa polls are correct, Rubio may be surging. Here's Emerson College's poll:

BREAKING #iacaucus poll: GOP Top 3: @realDonaldTrump: 27% @tedcruz: 26% @marcorubio: 22%. Full results available in AM. #EmersonPoll

— ECPS (@EmersonPolling) February 1, 2016

And then there's an Opinion Savvy survey, with Trump at 20.1%, Cruz at 19.4%, and Rubio at 18.6%.

On the other hand, Bloomberg's Joshua Green said a couple of days ago that the Rubio surge isn't real:

Bloomberg News reporter Joshua Green analyzed the latest polling information during an interview on Breitbart News Sunday on the evening before the Iowa caucus.

He dismissed the buzz coming out of Washington D.C. suggesting that the Florida senator was surging right before the Republican primary caucus.

“There is no surge,” he said in an interview with Breitbart News Chairman Stephen K. Bannon on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125. “There is no evidence of anything like that.”

... He said that Rubio began in the single digits and managed to raise his polling numbers about five or six points before ending up with 15 percent.

“I wouldn’t call that a surge, it’s more of a gentle incline,” he said.

But it doesn't matter. A gentle incline is enough. If Rubio is in third place, if he's less than 10 points behind the winner, and if he wins a moderate number of delegates, he'll be on the front page of every mainstream media news site tomorrow -- yes, in a three-shot with #1 and #2 on many sites, but often in a two-shot with just the winner, and sometimes alone. (I think it'll be his face you see on Fox sites, given Rupert Murdoch's increasingly obvious preference for him. NBC News, too -- if you have the phrase "establishment lane" in a Chuck Todd drinking game over the next week, you might want to write a will before playing, because Todd's going to Todd's going to tell us endlessly that Rubio is the undisputed master of said lane.)

I'll post this again:

@ThePlumLineGS @EricaGrieder It's like watching parents attempt to will their toddler into doing a difficult task.

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 29, 2016

Little Marco may be about to take his first step today, after all that parental cheering.