Rick Santorum sort of officially beat Mitt Romney in the state-wide voting by 34 votes, according to Iowa state GOP officials. It would be even more official if those same officials could find the vote tallies from 8 of their 1,774 voting precincts…seems the mostly volunteer staff who conducted the voting sort of lost some records or went on vacation before reporting or something…
Anyway, it really doesn't make any difference. Both of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination got about 30,000 votes -- that's about ONE-HUNDREDTH OF ONE PERCENT of the estimated 230 million Americans who will be eligible to vote for the next president in November. Santorum's sort of final margin of victory is so small it would be tedious to write it out in words or decimal places….
...and anyway, the political nomination process in Iowa is not based on a winner-take-all statewide vote count, it's based on precinct delegate winners going to county conventions where delegates are selected to go to the Iowa state party convention. This newly revised vote total doesn't change anything about how many delegates Santorum and Romney are going to get from Iowa.
These two guys finished in a dead heat on January 3, and the updated result is still a dead heat by any reasonable reckoning. It is political bamboozlery of the first order to say anything else about it.
So I won't. I pretty sure someone else will.
My previous posts about the Iowa caucuses:
A very few, the first time...
Much ado about the few
The few, the partisan
Spoofing democracy in the Iowa caucuses
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