congressman paul and all of the other can dates who competed in the 2012 caucuses. have a good night. what is the final turn out. final number is 122,255. thank you, everybody. all right. there you heard matt straum. eight votes, he said that romney is the winner by eight votes over rick santorum. ron paul third. how many total turn out did they say. 122,255. like 118, 119 four years ago. so a little bit more. not much more. certainly not close to the 220,000 or so that turned out four years ago in the democratic caucuses. do you think the whole issue of whether that is an energized republican base or not, what is your view having seen so many. i think the last time around, i think that s a record, 119 or 118,000. a little bit more. so i m sure they will be happy. though i had heard from other republicans they were hoping for
split, mitt romney and rick santorum leading amongst republicans ron paul third. and santorum will get the social conservative. that s right. so we ll watch this, see which way this breaks. erin doing the fabulous flick over there on those two screens. more flicking coming up. but these are the official numbers that are coming in right now. 22% of the precincts have now been counted. doesn t get a whole lot closer than this. mitt romney, rick santorum, ron paul all with 23%. mitt romney 43 votes ahead of santorum. 6 a 256 for rick santorum, 6,240 for ron paul. newt gingrich 13%. everybody else 10%, perry, michele bachmann 6%, 1% jon huntsman. a quarter of the votes are in and look at how close it is. wolf, sometimes we make this
rick santorum, second, 30,007 votes. mitt romney wins by a grand total of eight votes. eight votes. ron paul third. newt gingrich fourth. and you saw the others earlier. an amazing moment. mitt romney wins, albeit, narrowly, on the other hand, john, a win is a win. a win is a win. and you have watched. this is our final number, wolf. this is our final number from the iowa republican party. 30,015 to 30,007. thanks fot great work of our ladies helping us crack the end of the difference. clinton county, you don t think of thiss much. 32% to 22%. this county made the difference for governor romney tonight. if you pull out this map and look at the breath of this, you see a lot of purple. that s rig santorum doing a very well. a lot of comparison to the mike huckabee.
webster county, we re waiting for that. this is key. if rick santorum going to pull it out, he needs to turn the rest of the map purple. if romney s going to pull this out, he needs to improve their standings as they start counting the votes. romney is ahead here. if he keeps that margin when the rest of this comes in, it is one of the larger population centers in the state. he could make up the votes in places like this. but, wolf, we re up to 54%. the pace is starting to pick up. we ll keep up with the math. let me go back to the wall and take a closer look at these numbers right now. more than half of the precincts reporting, 54%. and rick santorum, the former senator from pennsylvania maintaining a slight lead over mitt romney by 401 votes, 14,606 to 14,205. ron paul third, not that far behind, 13,145. newt gingrich, a distant fourth, only 13%, 8,081. let s take a look at the bottom three right now.
is getting ready to fly it texas to reassess whether he should bother, whether he should continue in new hampshire and south carolina. michele bachmann coming in sixth. she says she will continue but we will see if she does. jon huntsman in new hampshire. we are waiting it speak with the chair of the republican committee right now that is going to announce that one final precinct. we are going to speak to that precinct captain shortly. we will try to find out what is going on. has there been a snag, a snafu, a hanging chad. we don t know what is going on. but one precinct would colorado make the difference between who is number one, number two and how much of a gap there is. let s go over and talk to all of our contributors and friends. anderson, i think we will get that precinct captain pretty soon, on the phone, and we will hear what the problem is, if there is a problem. because we want to know. who is the winner. i was going to say, what do you want to say to that preci