EEEWWW!
I have checking the results from Iowa, but headlines featuring ‘Santorum, Romney, and Paul’ and ‘three-way’, are just too icky.
The caucuses select 25 delegates. Three more are uncommitted. It has been reported that the delegates are assigned proportionally, not winner-take-all.
Update at 9:50 – Santorum, Romney, Paul, Gingrinch, Perry, Bachmann above 4% and in that order with 88% of the vote counted.
Update at 11:50 – with 99% of the votes counted the order stays the same, but only about 30 votes separate Santorum and Romney. There are no recounts, and the delegate assignment may not correspond to the vote count [it’s a complicated system].
6 comments
I like your idea of making Iowa do its primary last. I am so tired of the media going bonkers over a primary where the state’s number of voters matches my city’s population.
My final word on the caucuses for the evening was “Man-on-Dog Bites Doggone Man.” Says it all, doesn’t it!
ellroon, surely you don’t expect “democracy” in a nation where small states are automatically over-represented, and in many states (such as Texas), rural counties are over-represented at the state level? Remember, our Founders were mostly wealthy plantation owners…
[Next morning…] Well, that’s what I get for going to bed “early.” Dewey Defeats Truman! Gore Defeats Bush! Oh, wait; Gore really did… aw, never mind.
Somehow I knew Romney would manage to spin this as a “win” … there’s no way the GOP powers-that-be would allow a Santorum win to stand. But this doesn’t bode so well for their chances in November.
Does this mean that Romney is now President and there won’t be any more political punditry for another four years????
The Iowa caucuses are a media creation, with more media at many events than actual voters. It was boosted as important by the McGovern campaign in the 1972 election and the media created it as ‘a time-honored tradition’, i.e. something that is important only because people say it’s important and ‘we’ve always don’t it this way’ since a couple of years ago.
One of the curses of hanging around for a an extended period is that I remember when all of these ‘time-honored traditions’ didn’t exist.
As I just posted, this was about delegate count and the top three all got the same number of delegates, so the ‘8 votes’ didn’t mean anything real. Delegates aren’t awarded based solely on the absolute number of supporters, but on where you won.
Alas, alack, Jams, the farce continues for months. The conventions are in late summer, and the election in November. I really like the parliamentary system of 6 weeks – start to finish.
Let’s be honest, the media makes a lot of money from political advertising, so it is their best interests to drag this out as long as possible. Citizens United is a gold mine for the six conglomerates that control the media.