That this is a year when everything is up for grabs was confirmed a week ago in Iowa, with two almost equally unacceptable outsiders — Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump — running 1 and 2 in Iowa’s Republican caucuses. The party establishment would take their own lives if one of them actually wins the nomination.

The surprise of the night was how well Sen. Marco Rubio did — so well he gave a speech thanking his lord and savior Jesus Christ as if he’d won the whole thing.

Maybe he has. Before Monday night, he was in no man’s land, neither fish nor fowl, establishment or insurgent. His party had dismissed him as an Obama clone, an inexperienced first-term senator, his hair not gray enough, his boots too high, leaping in before his time. That’s been a public and particular affront to his mentor Jeb Bush. You couldn’t find their differences with a microscope. Having jumped the line, Rubio hadn’t looked strong enough to challenge the unacceptable front-runners.

Now he does. That sound you hear this morning is the Republican Party revving its motors in the establishment lane, ready to race toward Rubio as its personal savior if he can extend his Iowa showing into New Hampshire tomorrow. Rubio had little establishment competition in Iowa.

By contrast, Trump’s RPMs were way down as he conceded to Cruz, whispering his name once in one of the shortest speeches he’s ever given. He recalled how he was warned by everyone not to go to Iowa, he couldn’t win. He didn’t, but never mind.

Trump lost altitude in the last few days before the Iowa vote, putting a lie to the almost universal opinion that skipping the last debate was a brilliant move that saved him from incoming fire and exposed his challengers to withering questions from the mighty Megyn Kelly. Instead, it exposed his thin skin and the emotional instability of a crybaby who takes his ball and goes home because he didn’t get his way.

There wasn’t the revolution on the Democratic side that Sen. Bernie Sanders had hoped for. Still, he rightly declared himself in a virtual tie with Hillary Clinton, a comeback kid of sorts given that he started at zero. For her part, Clinton couldn’t resist acting like the presumptive nominee by declaring victory early in the night, before anyone could possibly know.

With the country being disrupted in so many ways — how it hails a cab, goes to school, reads a newspaper, drives a car, makes a phone call, watches television — it’s high time our broken politics be disrupted. Here’s a 74-year-old socialist nearly defeating the Clinton juggernaut. Over there, the Man Least Respected in the Senate, with algorithms, organization and religion on his sleeve, comes from behind to upset Trump.

China was broken in Iowa. On to New Hampshire.

Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist.