“When a candidate loses because voters don’t know him, he can regroup. If he crumbles because they do know him, his campaign has nothing to say. After his collapse in Iowa, Newt Gingrich will have been revealed as a candidate with too much baggage to board the flight to New Hampshire, much less South Carolina or warmer battlegrounds. Gingrich will suffer the cruelest possible fate: irrelevance. His tombstone will read, ‘They liked him least, who knew him best.'”

– GOP strategist Alex Castellanos