The Good evening and welcome to tonight's special coverage. I'm Rachel Matto here at

the MS NBC Mothership with my colleagues Joy Reed and Lawrence O'Donnell and Jen

Saki and Ari Melburg. Great to have you all here. Our friends Chris Hayes and

Alex Wagner and Stephanie Rule are all going to be joining us later. It's going to be fun.

We're less than a week out from the Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa.

The last Iowa Republican debate is underway tonight with oddly a sort of random

selection of two of the remaining five Republican presidential candidates

taking part in that debate.

If you can, right now, name all five remaining

Republican presidential candidates off the top of your head

without looking anything up.

Congratulations and also you need to get out more.

But two of them are debating tonight,

Nicki Haley and Ron DeSantis.

Also tonight, two miles away from that final Iowa debate.

Fox News conducted a live town hall with the

front-running Republican candidate who of course has refused to participate in

any debates at all this year, but who has been very busy appearing in courtrooms in the many, many, many cases in which he is currently a criminal or civil defendant.

The biggest news of all tonight, both in Iowa and in the race at large, is that the Republican

field shrunk tonight from six candidates to five, with the surprising but not shocking news that Chris Christie has

dropped out of the race. Governor Christie is the only Republican candidate who

has been running his presidential campaign directly and

...