So did Mitt Romney concede the Iowa caucuses to the actual winner Rick Santorum? And why does this all seem like it’s turned into a bad case of hurt high school feelings?
This afternoon, the Santorum campaign told Jeff Zeleny of the NY Times that Romney had called to concede.
But not so fast. The Romney campaign then told Jennifer Rubin that there was no concession — Romney was simply calling to congratulate Santorum “like a good sport” about a result that they say is a tie.
Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul e-mailed this statement to TPM and other reporters: “Gov. Romney called Sen. Santorum to congratulate him on the Iowa results.”
Meanwhile, Bret Baier reports, Santorum still believes the call should properly be considered a concession: “Well then what was he calling to congratulate me for?”
When they see each other at the big dance…er, debate tonight, things could get tense.
Meanwhile, in an interview set on CNN set to run Thursday in the 4 p.m. ET hour, Santorum claimed victory:
BLITZER: You know, have they officially told you you won.
SANTORUM: Yes. I got an e-mail at 4:51 this morning saying that — the certified vote. We won by 34 votes. If they include these other very, very small precincts that have not been officially certified but were phoned in on election night, we actually won by more than 35 — 34 votes.
So either way you tally it, we were successful. And we feel very good about that. And we’ve, you know, we have a — a strong plan to continue that momentum and take it here to South Carolina now and off to Florida.
State GOP chairman Matt Strawn had previously declared on caucus night that Romney had won, based on unofficial returns showing Romney ahead by 8 votes.
However, the certified official returns have revealed that Santorum was actually the winner by 34 votes.
And including the caucus-night numbers from eight precincts that were left out of the certified count due to having lost their official documentation, Santorum wins by 69 votes. While it cannot be disproven that his 35-vote margin across those eight precincts might contain an error, it is also highly unlikely that such an error would have occurred to reverse Santorum’s victory.