"So, with the Iowa caucuses in the books, our attention turns to the matter of who "won" last night. Technically, the "winner" is Mitt Romney, who eked out a plurality of the votes cast, by an eight-vote margin. But, as many are noting, Rick Santorum was perhaps the biggest "winner," relatively speaking, because his bare-bones, on-the-cheap retail operation came within a hair of besting the big-spending, Super-PAC enabled Romney. And of course, Ron Paul, who doubled up his 2008 total but only managed a third place finish, was nevertheless acting like a winner last night as well.
And yet, this was an election that was decided by a teensy fraction of the available humans in Iowa who could come around and cast a vote last night. This year's Iowa Caucus is being billed as one of the best ever -- a record turnout, in fact. But if last night was a record turnout, then the Iowa caucuses are some sort of "tallest hobbit" contest.
The numbers tell the story: of the 2,250,423 voters in the state (using the higher voting-eligible population), only 147,255 came out last night. And of those, only 122,255 voted in the Republican contest, for a turnout percentage of 5.4 percent. And if any of the hype about Democrats, Occupiers, Anarchists, interlopers, and stray ACORN activists (those that haven't been secreted off to Bagram Air Force Base for indefinite detention) -- all voting on the GOP side to gum up the works -- is true, it's possible that there was an even smaller percentage of sincere GOP voters.
And former Massachusetts Gov. Romney won by 8 votes, a percentage of the voting population that even Wolfram Alpha cannot calculate into a percentage that my mathematically-challenged mind can handle.
So, it's a good thing we made such a big deal about last night's events, right?
La suite: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/iowa-caucus-results_n_1184479.html?ref=politics
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