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Like a mindless herd, we journalists have anointed Iowa the nation’s presidential kingmaker, and established a narrative that assigns the candidate winning the state “momentum” and “electability”…despite the fact that the caucuses aren’t even a binding vote.

Recap from It's a Free Country.

Welcome to Politics Bites, where every afternoon at It's A Free Country, we bring you the unmissable quotes from the morning's political conversations on WNYC. Today on the Brian Lehrer Show, Josh Rogers, political reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio, and Anna Sale, It's A Free Country political reporter, talked about Tuesday's New Hampshire primary and the last-minute challenges for Mitt Romney.

Two hope to keep their surprising momentum going, while a third looks for his big break.

A tracking poll shows Romney sliding. Is this the Iowa roller coaster all over again?

Good luck, Newt. Pandora's Box of corporate money has been opened by the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, and all your rhetoric, offended posture and finger-wagging won't change anything. Romney's own millions are backed by millions more that have been given unfettered access to flood our elections.

New Hampshire poses a much bigger threat to the Republican Party's struggle to designate a Presidential nominee than we thought.

Every Friday, The Takeaway convenes a panel to look back at the week's big stories. Among the headlines, after Mitt Romney squeezed out Rick Santorum by just eight votes in the Iowa caucuses, his hometown newspaper, The Boston Globe, endorsed rival Jon Huntsman. Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann dropped out of the race after placing last in Tuesday's caucuses. President Obama and Congressional Republicans are doing battle again, this time over his recess appointment of Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Aside from only losing by eight votes, Rick Santorum's second-place status is even more remarkable given that he had remained near the bottom of polls for months. Displaying a momentum of interest the GOP field hasn't seen since Herman Cain, there's a good chance Santorum could overtake Romney in New Hampshire.

In Iowa if you “can’t make it here you probably can’t make it anywhere” is the general principle. Think it’s going to be easier running a campaign in 11 Super Tuesday states?

What would an anthropologist make of the curious ritual of the Iowa caucuses? Part town meeting, part beer party, part coffee clatch with hot dishes, the Iowa caucuses may seem like an odd way to elect a politician to an outside observer. Every four years, the world media tries to decipher the curious liturgy of this bit of democracy in the heartland of America. The BBC's Paul Adams filed this report about looking at an American electoral tradition from a foreigner's perspective.

A sixth place showing should have been Waterloo for the girl from Waterloo.  Instead, she vowed to head to South Carolina (Santorum, in a nice touch, made clear New Hampshire was next). After being burned by unlimited and anonymous negative campaign funding, Gingrich may just become the newest ally to overturn Citizens United.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won in the state’s wealthier more urban counties – the wealthy Monied Burbs, exurban Boom Towns and collegiate Campus and Career locales. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum won all the other county types including the agricultural Tractor Country, culturally conservative Evangelical Epicenters and aging Emptying Nests.

Twitter was around four years ago, the last time the nation focused its attention on the Iowa primaries. But since then, while President Obama struggled, the economy sputtered, and the GOP dithered, Twitter was — to borrow a term from the microblogging service — trending upward. In the rejiggered electoral landscape of 2012, trending on Twitter is as good as publicity used to be. John Hockenberry takes a look at the major trends on Twitter during the Iowa caucuses.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney edged out former Senator Rick Santorum by just eight votes in Tuesday night's Iowa caucuses. After spending most of the night locked in a dead heat with Santorum and Rep. Ron Paul, Romney was declared the winner early Wednesday morning with 24.6 percent of the vote. Paul finished in third place, followed by Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann. Perry announced he would suspend his campaign to return to Texas.

Voters rendered the first verdict in the 2012 race for the White House on Tuesday in Iowa caucuses from Adel to Zearing. GOP candidates blanketed the state, while Democratic President Barack Obama spoke to delegates via live feed.

Over 100,000 voters will head to the polls on Tuesday evening to select their 2012 presidential nominee. A Des Moines Register poll conducted last week put Mitt Romney in the lead with 24 percent of GOP caucusgoers' votes, followed closely by Ron Paul at 22 percent and Rick Santorum at 15 percent. Yet only 51 percent of those surveyed were decided. 

While many focus on who the winner of the Iowa Caucus will be later this evening, the true question to be answered is whether certain candidates ranking near the bottom in the minds of voters will get the message that their best course of action is to drop out.

Following her sixth place finish in the Iowa Caucuses last night, in which she only got five percent of the vote, Michele Bachmann announced this morning that she's ending her campaign for president.

Opening day rarely decides the baseball season. Opening night isn't the entire run of a Broadway show. But these first public moments do help shape the next steps.