By Maggie Astor: Subscribe to Maggie's RSS feed
December 8, 2011 7:59 AM EST
With the Iowa caucuses less than a month away, the race for the Republican presidential nomination has entered a new and potentially decisive phase.
A series of conservative challengers to Mitt Romney have come and gone: Michele Bachmann. Rick Perry. Herman Cain. Now it is Newt Gingrich's turn, and increasingly, conservatives are coming to the conclusion that he is their last hope.
Gingrich may keep his lead or he may not, but in either case, it seems unlikely that another anti-Romney will scrape him- or herself off of the bottom of the poll bucket in time for the first blows of the primary season in January.
So that leaves Republican voters with three viable choices: Gingrich, Romney, and to a lesser extent Ron Paul, who is lagging in national polls but is gaining state-level support with his grassroots efforts in Iowa. Who will become king of the post-Cain era?
Gingrich's Race
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With every day struck off the Iowa caucus countdown while Gingrich maintains his lead over Romney, the race becomes that much more Gingrich's to lose.
Costas Panagopoulos, a political scientist at Fordham University in New York, told the International Business Times that Gingrich has the potential to sustain his lead in a way that previous "anti-Romney" candidates could not, because he is a "known quantity" within the Republican Party.
"I think that has the potential to take him a long way," Panagopoulos said.
Unlike Perry and Cain, Gingrich "has been tested in the national public arena," David Paleologos, director of the Political Research Center at Suffolk University in Boston, added. "Those are qualifications that have staying power."
This doesn't mean he will win the nomination, but he will be a strong contender.
"One outcome I don't see happening is, I don't think Gingrich goes away like both Perry and Cain did," Paleologos told IBTimes. "I don't know if he'll maintain the margins that he's showing, but I don't think he goes away, either. So I think he'll stay as a top contender, if not the front-runner, between now and the early primaries and caucuses."
The Republican electorate may be gripped by anti-Washington sentiment, but at the same time, they want someone who knows enough about how the system works to change it.
"He's someone who, admittedly, comes with a great deal of history and even some baggage, but at the same time, there's no question about his experience and his familiarity with the issues the country is grappling with," Panagopoulos said.
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