Three days before the South Carolina Republican primary, the press corps is poised to declare the GOP race over. If Mitt Romney follows up his wins in Iowa and New Hampshire with a win in the South, the media will tell Republicans in the other 47 states that there’s no need for them to cast votes in a democratic fashion, Romney’s coronation being inevitable.

Of course, the press’s portrayal is hardly the only way that these events could be reported. Romney won in Iowa — if, in fact, he actually did win in Iowa — with less than 25 percent of the vote and by a smaller margin than might typically decide a Rotary Club or homeowners association election. He then won a convincing plurality (not a majority, not even 40 percent) of the vote in New Hampshire, where he’s been campaigning for years, where he owns a house, and where his home state of Massachusetts lies just across the border. If he wins in South Carolina, that would clearly be a good win for him. But it would also be his first win in a Republican-leaning state, it would at least partly be attributable to his momentum going in, and it would again be without anything approaching a majority of the vote. Would this be evidence of a juggernaut?