Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann will head straight from Iowa to South Carolina, bypassing New Hampshire.
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Campaigns have a way of not working by logical principles or, perhaps we should say, Newtonian physics. But I think Roger Simon has the gist of where the GOP primary campaign is right now. Namely, 1st, 2nd and 3rd are equally wins for Mitt Romney tomorrow night. And a Santorum surge doesn’t matter all that much. Why? Because there are only two candidates in the race who have the wherewithal to seriously challenge Romney over the long haul: Gingrich and Perry. If they’re losers tomorrow night, they’re probably done. And Rick Santorum just doesn’t have the money or the organization or the staying power outside a state like Iowa to seriously challenge Romney.
Like I said, I resist these deductive reasoning approaches to campaign analysis. There are always emergent properties we can’t quite predict. But this analysis is pretty hard to find fault with.
Be sure to join us tomorrow night at 8 PM Eastern for live results of the Iowa Caucus, the first ‘voting’ of the 2012 primary cycle. We’ll have live county by county results of the totals out of Iowa.
With all the polls entered and one day before the election, the TPM Poll Average of Iowa is:
Romney, 21.3%
Paul, 20%
Santorum, 17.3%
Gingrich, 15%
Perry, 9.6%
Bachmann, 7.2%
Here’s the latest look at the chart: Read More
Pizza Ranch manager in Boone, Iowa debuts “Santorum Salad“.
Our ace video editor Michael Lester compiled this blooper reel from outtakes of TPM’s Campaign In 100 Seconds series: Read More
Benjy Sarlin explores one of the odder dynamics of the GOP primary cycle: The more the candidates vied to be the anti-Romney, the more shots they took at each other and the fewer they took at Mitt, leaving him largely untouched in some of the most bruising campaign battles leading up to the Iowa caucus.
Mitt Romney is just finishing up a speech bashing China — inter alia — at a factory in Iowa that openly prides itself on its ability to outsource work to China.