tonight. i ve got to push back a little bit, ari, i love your tie, but a couple things push me wrong there. if you are rick santorum, south carolina, january 21st, florida, january 31st, nevada, february 4th. you look at the poll numbers, how well mitt romney is doing in new hampshire. clearly, you want to focus and put out your economic message when it comes to new hampshire, but this is also a matter of strategy. if you re rick santorum, you want to be able to make a play in those other three states. it s not necessarily all about, i need to quickly make something happen next week, because you have to say, wait a minute, i could potentially be the guy who is the anti-romney. so he focused on iowa. he said, i need to do well here. he s done that. he now can have a longer strategy but he s not the only guy who wants to be the anti-romney. he s not going to be able to but if perry s 10% tonight there s no way he can. he can start fund-raising off of iowa immediately, but
i keep moving around here. very dynamic night here. the map is starting to populate in terms of the population centers. what are we seeing now? what we re seeing is, a, more of the counties filling in. this part of the state is very important. again, the split. four years ago, this was mike huckabee country. one county for romney, country county for romney here. this is your tea party evangelical vote. mike huckabee took it all four years ago. we ve got a split. the lighter pink is ron paul, the dark red is mitt romney, the purple is rick santorum. we have a three-way race here. earlier i told you michele bachmann was winning one county. that was this county up here, howard county. rick santorum now has the lead there with 80% of the vote counted. michele bachmann is on track right now to not even win one iowa county. newt gingrich is carrying this county up here right now, 50% of the vote in. but as you can see, pretty close. we ll watch the vote come in. anderson, right now, almo
high turnout, we have a big intensity gap this time? many democrats will say no, many republicans will say, it s an improvement. one other point i want talk about. if we have a close race, i want to look at candidate visits. let s close this down, take away the graphics. this is rick santorum, he visited all 99 counties. look at him out in the western part of the state that mitt romney carried four years ago. let s look at mitt romney, he visited this area the least. of the candidates who visited iowa in this cycle, it was romney the least. santorum tonight is going to claim doing it the old-fashioned bay has helped. if you close this down and just come back and look, we re filling in the map at 88%. wow. just wow. and we re going to look at who s left. you look at these open counties, there s no votes here, tiny counties. they could make a difference. in a very close race, they could make difference.
population centers. by iowa standards, that means here, polk county. only 30% of the vote counted right here, ron paul is winning, but by the tie nest margin, mitt romney not that far behind. this is where the most votes are still outstanding tonight, in the center of the state, by the state capital. duh buick, about 44% of the vote counted. one of the things we ll do throughout the night, romney tonight, match it up to romney four years ago. he had 42% there four years ago, just 33% now. he neds eds to continue to lead this county if he wants to pull this one out. another population center, davenport and cedar rapids here. here is our biggest question still remaining tonight. in the western part of the state, look at the open areas right here. this is a very conservative part of the state, and right here, these are mostly small counties, half a percent, 1 percent of the vote. but right here, where sioux city is, woodbury county, 3.5% of the population. you watch the western part fill
does soishl media count? where these results are right now, they re between 100, 200. that s where organization comes in. and that s what we did. we d be focused on sitting in those caucuses going, we didn t turn out 20 voters here. reporter: mary matalin, donna brazile, we ll be back with you. but right now we want to throw it back to wolf. thanks very much, candy. we ve got more official votes in. almost half of the precincts have now reported, 46%. and all of a sudden rick santorum is slightly atop the field with 24%. he s 162 votes ahead of mitt romney, 12,417 for rick santorum, 12,255 for mitt romney. ron paul is now third, 22%, 11,238. newt gingrich, look at this, a distant fourth, only 6,788 votes, 13%. if we move to the bottom three, you see rick perry with just more than 5,000 votes, 10%. almost 3,000 votes for michele bachmann, 6%. 300 or so votes for jon