Romney, Santorum on top
Paul runs strong third as Iowa opens voting for 2012
DES MOINES, Iowa — The Iowa caucuses came down to Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum battling for victory late Tuesday night in the first contest of the 2012 presidential race.
Romney and Santorum were neck and neck, each with 24.6 percent of the vote. Ron Paul had 21.7 percent. About 95 percent of the 1,774 precincts had reported results.
“We’re going to go on. This momentum is going to continue, and this movement is going to continue,” Paul told supporters in Ankeny, Iowa.
The results were a clear setback for a pair of candidates who once were expected to be strong contenders for the GOP presidential nomination — Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who won a high-profile Iowa straw poll in August, was a distant sixth and now must consider dropping out of the race.
Perry told supporters late Tuesday that he would return to Texas to reassess his candidacy.
Gingrich, addressing supporters in Des Moines, thanked Iowans for their support and for looking beyond “the latest 30second distortion,” referring to attack ads against him.
President Barack Obama’s victory on the Democratic side was a foregone conclusion. His campaign is already on the scene in Iowa, a battleground state in the fall. And without a challenger for the nomination, Obama has the luxury of focusing on what is shaping up as a tough general election.
Not so the seven contenders for the GOP nomination. They have no time to pause before their next showdown, the New Hampshire primary, now less than a week away. If Romney were to score back-to-back wins in the first two contests — something no nonincumbent Republican presidential candidate has managed to accomplish — he would become a heavy favorite to gain the nomination.
At his final rally Tuesday, Romney turned his attention to Obama rather than his GOP rivals.
As Romney is fond of doing, he recalled the president’s prediction, in a TV interview during his first months in office, that if he didn’t turn around the economy, he’d be looking at a “one-term proposition.”
“I’m here to collect,” Romney told the audience at the Temple for Performing Arts Moines. “He’s out!”
Paul, the iconoclastic congressman from the Houston area, was never far from the lead in Iowa. He was considered among the bestorganized candidates, with a base of dedicated supporters.
Paul has been running for president, off and on, for a quarter-century. His libertarian streak and appeal to tea party voters, who often call him their godfather for his long, often lonely fight against federal spending, helped attract new supporters this time.
He also has a strong following on college campuses, though the fact that most of Iowa’s highereducation institutions are on break was a complicating factor.
Santorum, more than any other Republican, followed the classic Iowa playbook — spending
in
Des months visiting all 99 counties and talking to anyone who would listen.
The former Pennsylvania senator held more than 370 town hall-style question-and-answer sessions with voters, from the one that attracted a single voter to several that drew hundreds of supporters in the closing days of the campaign. Helped by his anti-abortion views, he gained endorsements from several prominent social conservatives in the state.
Iowa’s role, historically, has been to winnow the field. Tim Pawlenty, former governor of neighboring Minnesota, abandoned his presidential race after a poor finish in the Ames straw poll.
That straw vote, an early organizing challenge in the Hawkeye State, helped push Bachmann to the top. But she soon saw her candidacy fade. Since 1979, no GOP candidate who won the summertime straw poll ever finished worse than second in the caucuses.
Bachmann, perhaps the earliest favorite, was quickly overtaken by Perry. But he soon faltered.
Gingrich, whose early organizational and fundraising problems had virtually eliminated him from consideration, became the next Republican to get a turn at the top spot in the polls. But he was unable to survive a battering of ads that were designed to remind voters of Gingrich’s “baggage.”
Next week the contenders will be off to South Carolina, with a history of always backing the winner of the GOP nomination.