I'm going to extrapolate some possible futures here:
1) The Worldcon Committees -- both Sasquan and Big Mac II, as well as some of the future bids -- will be taking a close look at how the Hugo awards are nominated. The business meetings will be contentious and lengthy, there will be considerable anger.
There might be some representation from some fans who agree with the positions of the slate-mongers, but I suspect the majority of fans at the business meetings will be against slates. (I have heard that none of the major architects of the sad-rabid slate have purchased attending memberships in Sasquan.)
The business meeting will consider -- and possibly pass -- some modification of the balloting process. There have been several good suggestions made, including a couple variations of the Single-Transferable-Vote. These would allow representation without domination. It is likely that a consensus will form before August.
The goal will not be to slap down any particular group. The goal will be to guarantee that no specific group can so dominate the balloting as to deny other qualified works a fair chance.
2) The narrative about the sad-rabids has crystallized. As more than one analyst has pointed out, the sad-rabid position is based on a misreading of history and a misunderstanding of fandom -- a failure to understand the context into which they are speaking. While the slate-mongering is technically legal, it violates the spirit of fairness. As a result, they have made themselves a focus of fannish anger. Never a good thing. A growing majority of fans are seeing this situation as the efforts of a small group of extremists to take over something that has previously belonged to all fans, ie. an attempted coup.
The short-term result here is anger. That will pass. Not soon enough, but it will. The long-term result will be that anyone too closely identified with the sad-rabids, anyone who benefited from this slate-mongering, anyone who did not publicly withdraw, will be indelibly tainted. Fans have long memories. Some grudges in fandom date back to the universe that existed before the big bang. Harlan, for instance, is still working on grudges from the twelfth century...B.C.
Those who have been tainted will find that they have put unnecessary obstacles in their own paths. There are editors who will not want the stink that certain authors will be tracking with them. There are conventions that will not invite them to be on panels. There are awards they can never be considered for, lest others wonder if there was a political agenda at work. There are websites and fanzines and podcasts that will choose not to interview them -- conversely, there will be others that will interview them for their perspective on the situation, stirring the shit one more time and spreading it just a little more.
Maybe they will continue writing SF, maybe not. But they will never again have the opportunity to be validated by the larger SF community -- certainly not without someone asking what the hidden agenda might have been.
This is inevitable -- because the narrative that is growing around them is that by gaming the awards, they wanted to prove that the awards have been gamed in the past. So the real goal isn't just to win this year, but to destroy the credibility of the Hugos forever. (Not gonna happen, but that's a different discussion.)
3) One of two things will happen. Either the sad-rabids will declare victory and retire from the field, claiming that they proved their point -- or they will double down for next year.
If they retire from the field, the awards recover.
If they double down, if they try it again, then they will find they're speaking into a much more organized and aggressive context than before. Well, that will be a victory too -- because it will prove how important they are and how evil the progressive left really is.
4) Ultimately, the puppy movement is a dead end. The more it proceeds, the more publicity it gets, the more it looks like they're winning -- but the part that doesn't show is that the more publicity the puppies get, the more opposition they create.
Again, the business meetings in August will be contentious -- but the result will likely be a modification of the balloting process.
If the committees are smart -- and I'm sure they are -- in addition to counting next year's ballots by the existing rules, they can test the proposed modifications by also counting the ballots according to the proposed mods. This would allow fans to compare the old rules with the proposed new ones before voting on permanent adoption. If the puppies try again -- as they have threatened to, it will be a good test.
5) Finally, and this is the head-scratching part. For me, anyway. I'm not really sure what the puppies want. I'm left wondering if some of the best fiction Brad Torgersen has written has been his explanations of the puppy movement.
That some of the more extreme voices on the puppy side have insisted that this is their way of sticking it to "Social Justice Warriors" taints the movement as bigots, misogynists, homophobes, and racists. If that's not the goal of the sad-rabids, then what is?
And this is the real crux of the matter -- it's that endless endless endless endless endless discussion about the REAL definition of REAL science fiction (mixed in with a lot of ego-strutting). But the discussion about how to define SF was already old when I was in diapers. Today, it's seven decades older and still going strong.
What I noticed during the great New Wave v. Hard Science wars of the sixties was that the discussion was a healthy one, because writers on all sides of the argument saw the arguments as a challenge and went off to write stories that demonstrated the vigor of the field. It was a time that gave us so many classic works that even today, we still point to them as a standard of excellence.
If we are smart -- if we are up to the challenge as authors -- then we can use this situation as an opportunity to rise to the challenge and create stories even better than we thought we were capable of.
If we're smart enough and courageous enough and ambitious enough to take that path, then the legacy of the puppies will be that they pumped some fresh energy into the field.
Or...we can just rip each other's throats out for a few years until we're all exhausted.
Or -- as I said above, I'm predicting possibilities -- we'll probably do both.