As Republican Sarah Huckabee Sanders prepares for an apparent cake walk to her party's nomination for Arkansas governor, there's a bit more mystery about who she might face in November.
Five other candidates have announced for governor but none is well known and some of those campaigns could fold in the current political environment.
Attorney General Leslie Rutledge's recent decision to opt out of the governor's race and into the lieutenant governor's race cleared the way for Sanders' eventual nomination, assuming no other Republican candidate for governor surfaces to challenge her.
Sanders, who has already achieved historic fundraising for an Arkansas governor's race, has also picked up endorsements from most of the state's Republican leadership: Gov. Asa Hutchinson, other state constitutional officers, all six members of the state's congressional delegation and 101 members of the Arkansas Legislature.
Hutchinson is completing his second four-year term as governor and cannot run again. Sanders, who was press secretary to former President Donald Trump, moved back to Arkansas to pursue the office her father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, once held.
Trump has also endorsed Sanders for governor.
Despite how formidable a candidate Sanders is, the filing period for the 2022 elections won't even open until Feb. 22.
Not until the filing period closes on March 1 will the full field of gubernatorial hopefuls be known.
However, four Democrats and a Libertarian have announced their candidacies for governor.
The Democrats, all of whom are from Little Rock, are:
• Anthony Bland Sr., a business teacher with Little Rock School District, a small business owner and a martial arts instructor;
• Chris Jones, a nuclear engineer, urban planner and an ordained minister who formerly led the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub;
• James Russell III, owner and operator of a counseling business in Little Rock; and
• Supha Xayprasith-Mays, owner of a media marketing consulting company and president and CEO of a nonprofit jobs agency.
The Libertarian is Ricky Dale Harrington Jr., a former prison chaplain from Pine Bluff who was his party's 2020 candidate for U.S. Senate.
Because none of them is particularly well known statewide, all will have to spend time and money to introduce themselves to Arkansas voters.
Collectively, they've raised a fraction of the record $11 million in donations, mostly from out of state, that Sanders had collected as of the end of the third quarter.
Jones was the leading fundraiser among them, having raised more than $1 million for his campaign. He's also the most likely to be nominated by the state's Democrats from among the four-person field.
The Democrats will have a primary, which will get all of the candidates some added exposure. But the primary will also exhaust some of the resources the Democrats' eventual nominee will need to combat Sanders' seemingly endless campaign funding.
Libertarian Harrington won't even have a primary. The state's Libertarians will nominate their slate of candidates at a convention.
Better known than any of the Democrats or the Libertarian candidate is state Sen. Jim Hendren from Sulphur Springs, a former president pro tem of the state Senate who left the Republican Party in February and had been encouraged to make an independent bid for governor.
That's not going to happen. Hendren announced recently that he won't even be a candidate for re-election to the state Senate and confirmed as well that a gubernatorial race isn't in the cards either.
What he will do is continue his work with Common Ground Arkansas.
He started the nonprofit organization this year to advocate for candidates, particularly legislative candidates, of any political stripe who will focus on solving the state's problems rather than mimicking the intense partisanship coming from Washington these days.
It is an organization worth watching in this first election cycle since its creation, especially since the state's premier political contest -- this 2022 race for governor -- appears to be over before it's even officially begun.