In the political world, 2012 will be all about one thing: President Obama’s re-election bid and the Republican effort to defeat him.

Republicans will cast the first ballots in that race this Tuesday during the Iowa caucuses. For Minnesotan Michele Bachmann, who over the summer consolidated support among Iowa’s conservatives, won the Ames Straw Poll and knocked her fellow Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race before watching her supporters quickly move to new candidates, that could be the end of the road.

Bachmann spent much of the fall and winter campaigning in the state, completing a 10-day, 99-county tour of Iowa last week. She has made winning Iowa, and parlaying that victory to further success in South Carolina, her main strategy of advancing through the Republican nomination field.

But polls show voters have largely left her behind. The last six months have seen half a dozen conservatives briefly surge in the polls, only to see their supporters move, seemingly en masse, to a different candidate. By most accounts, Bachmann’s peaked in August, before Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and, finally, Rick Santorum, have taken gotten conservatives’ support, while Mitt Romney has had the steady backing of the party establishment throughout his run. Bachmann will need a surprisingly strong showing in the Iowa caucuses (not to mention a strong fourth quarter fundraising report) if she has any hope of advancing past the state.

Whoever wins the Republican nomination will go up against a president that has been reviled by the right, disappointed some on the left and seen wild swings in his approval rating throughout his first three years in office. In December, President Obama said his first-term accomplishments could stack up well against presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. He’ll run on that record, highlighting accomplishments that have inspired Democrats and incensed Republicans — among them, Wall Street regulatory reform, health care reform, massive government economic stimulus measures, the repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and ending the War in Iraq.

But the election will be decided by the economy. Obama was elected in 2008 amid one the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. With Democrats in charge of Congress for the first two years of his term, he was able to pass a series of economic stimulus measures that he will contend help stabilize the economy. His message will be: they weren’t popular, but they worked. Republicans, meanwhile, will argue that Obama has grown the size of government and vastly increased the national debt at a time when the government should move out of the way and let the free market work.

Republicans had an overwhelmingly successful election in 2010 running on a similar platform, tapping into the conservative populist fervor of the tea party. The trick for the Republicans now is to find a presidential nominee who can appeal to both the tea partiers and the moderate independents of the electorate-at-large. If the candidate is too far to the right, they risk losing the middle; too moderate, and they risk complacency among conservatives.

Economic indicators continue to bring positive news to Democrats: jobless claims are at the lowest level since 2008 and the unemployment rate ticked down last month. By extension (and perhaps in retaliation against a divided Congress largely perceived as one of the worst ever), Obama has seen gains in recent polling, with his approval rating sitting at 49 percent in two major mid-December polls.

Congressional races
It’s hard to really handicap Minnesota’s congressional races until a court panel finalizes the new district lines, which it is expected to do in February.

What we know for sure: Democrats want to unseat freshman Republican Chip Cravaack. Four Democrats are running for the opportunity to challenge Cravaack — former U.S. Rep. Rick Nolan, former state Sen. Tarryl Clark, Duluth City Councilman Jeff Anderson and former Al Franken staffer Daniel Fanning. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the national campaigning arm of the Democratic Party, has already committed a load of money to contest and will likely to continue to do so up until the election.

There is a chance that Cravaack’s 8^th District will look very different after redistricting than it does now. Two of the three maps the redistricting panel is considering move Cravaack from the district, which has been a historically liberal one, into a safer, more southern district. If that happens, the current crop of Democrats could continue to run against Cravaack wherever he ends up, or keep running in the 8^th if the seat is open. No matter where Cravaack runs, though, he’s likely to remain a top target for national Democrats.

Elsewhere, Republicans are targeting Rep. Tim Walz, the third-term Democrat from the southern 1^st District. Two Republicans, state Sen. Mike Parry and former state Rep. Allen Quist, have bids to seek the Republican nomination. Though Walz’s district will change in redistricting, he’s likely to remain in it and will be Republicans’ top priority in the state.

A handful of other incumbents have picked up challengers, but the national parties have not yet committed money to those races. At this point, it appears the 1^st District and the 8^th District will be the most contested in 2012, though we don’t know whether Bachmann will seek re-election to House if and when she drops out of the presidential race.

Meanwhile, three Republicans have announced runs against Democratic U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, but none of them are marquee names. Klobuchar is one of the most popular incumbent senators in the country is expected to have a relatively easy re-election bid next fall.

The Republican Party continues to try and find a more noteworthy candidate to challenge the first-term senator, but Republicans with high ambitions and any political sense at all are likely to sit out 2012 and lay the groundwork for a 2014 run against Al Franken, who won his 2008 election by 312 votes.

With the rise of SuperPACs (political action committees legally allowed to raise and spend as much money as they like) and the possibility that Obama will become the first candidate in U.S. history to raise $1 billion for his re-election campaign, this is set to be among the most in-your-face election years ever. If you have any doubt what will drive this year in politics, just turn on your television in late September or early October and you’ll have your answer, every single commercial break.

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry