This is How the Sausage is Made

Hey, just got back from helping out at one of the 4 caucus locations here in Madison County, Iowa. We had the South Half of Winterset and the fairly rural SW quarter of the County caucusing at the Middle School here in Winterset. The North 1/2 of town & the NE quarter of the County were about 2 blocks away at the Jr. High School, and the NW and SE quarters of the County were in Earlham and Truro, respectively.

The raw numbers from my home County? Here you go:

Santorum.......223
Paul...............221
Romney.........170
Perry.............154
Gingrich.........144
Bachmann........54
Huntsman..........5
Cain..................1
Roemer.............1
"No Preference"..1
"Other"..............1

Here's the numbers from the DSM Register as of 9:20 CST (49.5% reporting):

Santorum 24.3%
Romney 23.6%
RuPaul 21.8%
Gingrich 13.3%
Perry 10.1%
Bachmann 5.6%
Huntsman 0.6%
"Other" 0.4% (229 votes)
Cain 0.0% (23 votes)
Roemer 0.0% ( 9 votes)

What does it all mean? Beats the hell out of me. Santorum seems to be the current recipient of all the Evangelical "Not Romney" votes, with Paul getting enough votes to grab the "coveted" 3rd place slot in Iowa (which, IIRC, Pat Robertson used to coast to victory in the General Election in 1988. Or not.). Gingrich & Perry probably also survive to fight another day, but I'm thinking that Drew's idea of the lesser of the two being used as an electoral "organ donor" to keep the other one going is on the right track.

The big news of the night? Michelle "I was born in Iowa" Bachmann is done. Stick a fork in her....or if you're our bald-headed prick of a state senator Kent Sorenson, you can stick a knife in her back instead (again). A 6th place finish wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that she WON the freaking Iowa Straw Poll back in August.

The rest? Huntsman has declared that "Iowa picks corn, New Hampshire picks Presidents". That's a neat soundbite. Maybe he should call Rudy Giuliani to see if it gets a chuckle out of him? He's an electoral dead man walkin', he just doesn't know it yet.

Cain? Well, if he had any illusions about restarting his campaign due to a groundswell of support from the Iowa grassroots, they were pretty much shitcanned by the fact that he just got beat by "Other". By an approximately 10:1 ratio.

Roemer? Shit, he's still in the race? Apparently not if he only got 9 votes so far.

All I know for sure now is that January 4th is a New State Holiday here in Iowa: If they can declare a holiday for St. Patrick driving all the snakes out of Ireland, we can sure as hell declare a holiday to commemorate the day that all the candidates & operatives packed up & headed for New Hampshire.

At least our phone won't be ringing every 5 minutes the rest of the week. So I've got that to look forward to.

posted by Russ from Winterset at 11:00 PM

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