mike huckabee. they re hoping that bachmann win a few counties, perry wins a few counties. in the middle of the state where the evangelical voters are they hope that bachmann and perry come pine and that governor romney wins. fascinating to watch. this was four years ago. this is now. this is about to start filling in. once again, according to this entrance poll, the initial numbers suggesting that at the top tier, as we expected, ron paul, mitt romney and rick santorum. but i want to caution everyone, this is just the initial respondents. it could change as we get more information. four years ago it certainly did. it could change right now. erin burnett and gloria borger are watching this for us. we ve got 19 categories of what we asked people in the entrance poll. because there are multiple waves some of the first data we have now are the highly motivated
infrastructure that ron paul has. but a first would really grease those skids as they move into new hampshire where mitt romney is showing a huge lead. these are the early voters. this is the entrance poll. these are not official results. i want everyone to be cautious. over to john king. you made an excellent point. the early arrivals four years ago in the republican and democratic caucuses in iowa, they didn t necessarily we didn t necessarily get it right in terms of when all of the respondents came in. the most eager people show up early and sometimes the most organized campaigns show up late. we ll watch lou this plays out. if you look at this right now a dead heat in the early wave between ron paul and mitt romney, any minute now you ll start to see counties reporting their caucus results. we ve got seven candidates. huntsman is not really playing in iowa. six in contention in iowa.
it was about incredible spending increases we ve seen in washington and how we get our arms around the $15 trillion in national debt aaccumulated. iowans understand, at the end of the day more debt we have the more it chokes private sector investment. even though iowa is doing well relative to the rest of the country, agriculture is still going strong, there are looming financial obligations that quite frankly we ve seen the president kick the can down the road and we re looking for bold leadership and i think we ll end up with great leadership coming out of the caucus process and going into the primary caucus. even though we were very divided last night i know we ll be unified to defeat barack obama in this state come november. bill: iowans have done their job. matt, thank you for your time this morning. i want to share with our viewsers one more entrance poll we had last night. what is the most important candidate quality you re looking for? 31% said can they beat
at about six mints before 9:00 p.m. on the east coast nbc is now characterizing the iowa caucuses as too close to call. but again, based on early entrance polling ron paul, mitt romney, and rick santorum are competing to win. rather than calling this too early to call it is now being described by nbc news as too close to call. rick santorum, ron paul, mitt romney all in contention to win tonight in iowa. we have now more from our own entrance polling and for that we go to tamron hall. we ve now interviewed more than 700 republicans arriving at the caucuses tonight and our nbc news entrance poll, we re starting to get a clear picture of why ron paul, mitt romney, and rick santorum are competing to win.
the other thing, during the campaign, the president did differentiate himself with hillary clinton in talking about negotiating or having engagement. but there hasn t been engagement without preconditions. it s not like the president sat there. this is an obama 2012 campaign commercial. that clip that the gap between the president s promises in iowa and what he delivered, i mean, he can tick that down. it it s actually very narrow. all right. every saturday, i ask my guest what is we now know that we didn t know when the week began. so, tonight, i want to ask you folks what do we now know that we didn t know when the caucuses began. we now know, based on the entrance poll, of all of the different dem gratic subgroups that are broken down, and there are a lot. different age groups, gender, never attended college, post-graduate study. the group among which mitt romney did best is the group making over a hundred thousand.