By this time next week, the Iowa caucuses will be history and the votes in New Hampshire will have been counted. And there's a good chance that Californians will find themselves in the unaccustomed position of having a say in picking this year's presidential candidates.

After California moved its primary to Feb. 5, most experts agreed that the change wouldn't amount to much.

The script would be written the way it always has been, they said: The candidates will slug it out in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the voters there will sort things out, and someone from each party will come out of those states with unstoppable momentum.

Among those who have in recent months explained to me this fact of political life are two bona fide experts who have been through the presidential primary wars before: Republican John McCain and Democrat John Edwards.

I'm beginning to think they're wrong, and I'm not alone.

"I was a skeptic about moving the California primary this early," says Democratic strategist Garry South, who managed two successful gubernatorial campaigns in California. "But I have come to the view that it might be meaningful — and that, in fact, California could cinch the deal."

Duf Sundheim, former chairman of the California Republican Party, believes that the GOP primary is so unsettled that it's even possible voters in the nation's largest state won't be able to settle it in February.

"It's not inconceivable that this thing could go down to the convention," Sundheim told me last week. "Who would have thought it? In our lifetimes, we have always known these conventions to be nothing but meaningless advertising."

Polls at the moment point to possible scenarios that could make the votes of Californians very meaningful next month:

— With the three leading Democrats in a virtual three-way tie in Iowa and Barack Obama neck-and-neck with Hillary Rodham Clinton in New Hampshire, it's conceivable that front-runner Clinton will win neither.

— With national polls showing no Republican candidate having the support of more than a quarter of GOP voters, the field is more unsettled than any in memory. It's conceivable that Iowa and New Hampshire will produce two different winners, and it's likely that neither will be national front-runner Rudy Giuliani.

That would leave California as a potential West Coast backstop for the front-runners that could prevent them from being buried by early defeats.

South believes that California could be decisive for Clinton because she will come into a state where retail campaigning is impossible as a known commodity.

"Four years ago, Howard Dean was a front-runner, but no one really knew who he was," South said. "When he finished third in Iowa, he melted into a puddle on the floor. That's not going to happen with Hillary Clinton She can survive a close finish in Iowa and a close finish in New Hampshire because what happens after that augers in her favor."

South acknowledges that Obama is "a very good California candidate: fresh, young, biracial. He has a lot of things going for him that scratch Democratic itches in California."

Still, he believes California — along with New York, which will also vote Feb. 5 — will provide a stable floor for the Clinton campaign. "My guess is she's thanking her lucky stars that California moved its primary to Feb. 5," South told me.

On the Republican side, it's Giuliani who has the most to gain by the electoral dynamics of California: a state that's too big for retail campaigning and too expensive for massive television advertising.

Giuliani's strategy from the beginning has been to parlay the Feb. 5 New York and California primaries to amass so many delegates that his momentum becomes unstoppable.

"That's a very difficult game to play," Sundheim said. "But, frankly, I don't think they had much choice."

Sundheim told me he's been participating in a number of focus groups with Republican voters in recent weeks and has found "you really have to push people to pick a candidate."

With the field so unsettled, he says the question coming into California will be this: "Are people going to continue to support a wide variety of candidates, or when one catches fire will they rally around that candidate?"

The remarkable thing about 2008 is that California voters — not pundits, not political strategists, and not snowbound voters in New Hampshire — may actually be the ones who sort all these questions out.

— Timm Herdt is chief of The Star's state bureau. Read his political blog, "95 percent accurate," at www.VenturaCountyStar.com/herdt.