With just hours left before Iowa voters deliver the first real verdict of the 2012 campaign season, GOP candidates made their final appeals in hopes of swaying the state’s still-large number of undecided caucus-goers.

Mitt Romney, whose campaign has grown increasingly confident about a win or a very strong finish in a state that broke the former Massachusetts governor’s heart four years ago, told MSNBC that he’d be “among the top group” and that Iowa will give him “the kind of send-off we need for a pretty long campaign season.”

Eleventh-hour polls showed Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul vying for the lead, and the perceived volatility of the race was giving the entire field dreams of an Iowa surprise.

“I think anybody can come in first,” Newt Gingrich said on CBS’s “The Early Show,” just a day after telling his supporters that he likely wouldn’t win.

Caucuses start at 8 p.m. EST and meaningful results are expected by 11 p.m. — if not sooner. The record turnout for an Iowa GOP caucus is 119,000 (in 2008), but party officials expect that record to be broken on this cold but clear (and not stormy) January night.

In the meantime, the candidates were taking to the airwaves and putting the final touches on organizational blueprints that have been months in the making. The news thus far on Tuesday:

*There was tough talk galore aimed at Romney, with Santorum bashing his history on health care on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and Gingrich calling him a liar on CBS’s “Early Show.”

“You’re calling Mitt Romney a liar?” asked correspondent Norah O’Donnell.

“Well, you seemed shocked by it,” answered Gingrich. “Yes.”

Gingrich told reporters later in the day at a press conference in Burlington that he will begin airing ads in New Hampshire, Florida and South Carolina that draw a “contrast” between him and Romney.

“You’re going to see us draw a much clearer and sharper contrast with a Massachusetts moderate who in almost every one of his major public actions has been alienating from the standpoint of South Carolina conservatives,” Gingrich said. “The gap between Romney’s moderate Massachuestes views and Southern conservatism is oh, about the distance from Boston to Charleston.”

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