polls. it's really unclear why because she has at least at the beginning she had done pretty well in debates. she had been here campaigning very hard. she, like rick santorum at the end of this campaign, was around the state. she did all 99 counties. guess what, she was even born here. she was born in water loo, iowa. she is a native daughter of the state. she did not do very well. very disappointing. at the end of the day, suzanne, you know this. you've covered many campaigns. you need money to go on. if you're not doing well, the money dries up and that is a critical problem for her. >> it's a mystery. she actually won that straw poll back over the summer here. do we have any sense of why her campaign just didn't gain the traction that was necessary? >> you know, she was competing with other candidates here who were pretty strong when it came to being socially conservative, which is really where she was appealing. that definitely divided the vote. you know, it is a little bit of a mystery. it is definitely a little bit of a mystery why she didn't do as well as she did. talked to some republicans. they say that her campaign internally was a bit of a mess and that that was a big problem for her. that she never really got the organization here on the ground that she needed in order to do well. look, i mean, many candidates overcome that with their message and with their person namt. for her, she just didn't. >> do we know who she's endorsing and how important is that? >> we don't know. that is going to be one of the questions that i am sure a lot of other reporters are going to ask her, whether she will endorse. if she is 2technically suspendig her campaign? generally as you know in covering candidates who drop out, they don't do it right away. i remember mitt romney back in 2008, he dropped out of the race in a pretty abrupt way. he waited a little while before he officially formally backed john mccain. tim pawlenty, he pretty quickly endorsed mitt romney so you never know. >> dana, final question here. you and i have covered politics quite a bit. we've seen these republican women rise and fall. we saw sarah palin who elected to sit out this one. christine o'donnell, we'll talk to her in the next hour. we see michele bachmann here. what do you make of this? do you think it says anything about the state of women in the republican party? >> reporter: i'm glad you asked me that question because i've been thinking about this as i've been sitting here trying to think of what question i could ask her regarding the state of women. i think this is a disappointing end to -- an early end to her candidacy. i think that michele bachmann, if you are a republican woman, is probably somebody who you can look up to because she was, i think, simply a candidate, not a female candidate. she kind of stood up there with the boys and she definitely held her own. she talked about the issues that she believed in in a way that was i think very impressive for -- by any means and by any measure. i that i that is one thing that is different about her campaign. obviously when sarah palin came on the scene people looked at her and talked about the fact that she was a female and a female nominee, the first ever on the vice presidential ticket, but michele bachmann was a different kind of candidate. i think that's fair to say. >> all right. dana, hang with us. obviously we're going to go to that live as soon as she makes her announcement. i want to bring in john. john, we watched her support simply erode over a course of weeks if not months. where did her support come from in the first place? >> well, suzanne, sometimes we overcomplicate things. in the end, politics is about math. as dana noted, she won the aims straw poll, just shy of 5,000 votes back then. that's in august when people show up. look at the numbers last night, 6073 votes. 5% in the state where she was born. michele bachmann was born there. this right here is blackhawk county. you saw her. she spoke at a caucus here. there was a large caucus here. she came in, played up, i'm one of you. i'm from here. i understand you. i share your values. she said she was the republican who could beat barak obama. in the county where we saw her speak last night ron paul won, then mitt romney, newt gingrich, michele bachmann, she just barely by a few votes beat rick perry. you can't come in fifth place in the place you call home. look at her color. she is the yellow color. purple santorum. the dark red romney. orange pinkish color is ron paul. green, that means there was a tie in that county. of it not a ty involving michele bachmann it was ron paul and rick santorum. rick perry even carried two small iowa counties. if you are the midwestern candidate who knows, we will say for the next week mitt romney must win new hampshire. well, the michele bachmann dynamic in this campaign was michele bachmann must win iowa to prove she was a viable contender. not even close, suzanne. this is a simple case of simple math. she didn't prove herself in the one place she most needed to prove herself. >> john, i want to ask about her credibility here because some of the statements that she made really as she rose to prominence raised a lot of eyebrows, some of them that considered kind of outrageous. this is back in november of 2010. this is when she talked to anderson cooper. >> within a day or so the president of the united states will be taking a trip over to india that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. he's taking 2,000 people with him. he'll be renting out over 870 rooms in india. these are five star hotel rooms at the taj mahal palace hotel. this is the kind of over the top spending, it's a very small example, anderson. >> that was the kind of over the top statements that she used to make, john. having covered president obama's trip there, we knew it was patently false. she repeated misstatements about the risks of getting the hpv vaccine. >> she had a consistency problem. i asked her about this at the beginning of the campaign. i said do you understand now you're running for president. she said, yes, i've made a lot of mistakes in the past. i must meet a higher credibility test. that was before a few other con throw versal statements. you make a key point. this campaign up until the final ten days, two weeks in iowa was defined by what? the debates. in june or very first cnn debate, michele bachmann turned in a pretty strong performance. she went up in the polls. in the future debates she was not viewed, this is a race for the presidency. republicans, especially, again, up until the final ten days before iowa, even iowa was tracking the polls. the praise was defined by those debates and who was the most presidential. republican voters clearly made a decision in iowa last night, and the new hampshire polls, the south carolina polls, the florida polls, she has done this since the spring. republican voters across the country making a decision, looking at this field in picking a president, in picking a candidate she always said she was the best candidate to go up against barak obama. if you look at all the data the republican voters who will decide their nominee beginning in iowa last night just flat out disagree. >> john, one of the things, it was a campaign were some of the harsh statements against president obama. she had said previously that he may have anti-american views. she said his administration had embraced something what she said gangster government. >> she calls him a socialist. >> did this resonate with a certain population that doesn't like this president? >> you were having an interesting conversation. when sarah palin decided not to run, one of the big conversations was could michele bachmann pick up the sarah palin base. governor palin never ran for president. we don't know what her base would be. we do know who was attracted to her. one of the things we looked at in eye ee wa, this is tea party strength. we knew about evangelical voters. they've been a force for were. the tea party is a new presence on the scene. the darker the county, the higher presence of people who identify themselves as tea party voters. lot of tea party voters here, here, a lot of tea party voters here. michele bachmann with those statements, the harsh criticisms of obama care, socialist, gangster government, that was designed to appeal to the strong anti-obama sentiment in iowa. when you turn this off and turn this off, turn this off and come back to the regular map, any yellow? any yellow? did michele bachmann win in any of these places where you find deep pockets of the tea party? the answer is no. that's why she's about to suspend her campaign. >> john, final question here. suspending the campaign simply means -- she can continue to raise money here. herman cain suspended his campaign. what does this mean for her? >> most candidates do this, especially the lower funded candidates. herman cain got out in the last calendar year, in december. she is getting out in 2012. it is now where you can apply to the federal election committee for matching funds. she's a classic matching fund candidate. a lot comes in in small 25, 50, $100 donations from conservatives across the country. those campaigns can almost done their money by applying for federal matching funds. it helps pay off the debts, staff, the legal expenses it takes to close down the campaign. suzanne, there's a one in a million chance, i view this as far in the distance as a possibility you can get, that were something to happen in this race, she has the right to get back in. she's still officially a candidate. it almost never happens. this is a legal fundraising financial decision to suspend rather than end so they can do the paperwork and clean it up. >> john, we never imagined what would happen last night. you never know. one in a million chance. >> that's exactly right. >> thanks, john. we are awaiting michele bachmann's statement. she's going to have that president conference about the future of her campaign. as soon as that happens we'll bring it live. most of the republican candidates, it is bye-bye iowa, hello, new hampshire. mitt romney beat rick santorum by just eight, we're talking eight votes. each got about 25% of the vote. ron paul was a close third followed by newt gingrich. revved up santorum thanks his supporters for the late surge while romney took aim at president obama. >> he said three years ago after being inago gur rated, he was on "the today show" he said if i can't get this turned around i'll be looking for a one term presidency. we are here to collect. game on. >> by standing up and not compromising, by standing up and being bold and leading, leading with that burden and responsibility you have to be first you have taken the first step of taking back this country. and we are waiting for a live event. michele bachmann to talk a little bit about where her campaign is going to go. want to bring back dana bash. dana, much was made about her family. we've seen a lot of these candidates with their family members. we know she has four children and some 23 foster kids throughout her life. her husband as well. who's in the room with her now? paint a scene for us, if you will. >> reporter: well, no one yet. i'm looking over my shoulder yet to make sure. we were told she's going to come within the next two minutes. we should expect her at any minute. it's hard to imagine her not having her family around her as she has over the past few days campaigning around this state talking about the fact that she did believe that she was as john was saying the best person to beat barak obama, never mind the fact that obviously that did not even close to take hold with the republican voters that she was appealing to. look, this is going to be a very difficult comment that she's going to make. very difficult speech that she's going to make. very difficult for any candidate. i think it's even more so for her on a personal level because of the fact that she did make this run as somebody who is, as i said, a native daughter of iowa. the fact that she was born in waterloo. she is a congresswoman from minnesota, she came here, she officially kicked off her campaign in the city of waterloo. talking about the iowan values and so forth. it absolutely didn't take off beyond what happened earlier in the summer, which was her very strong showing. in fact, not only did it not take off, it absolutely plummeted. the more she went around the state, the more she talked, the less she gained voters. that was obviously a huge, huge problem in the results that we saw last night. >> she was one of the candidates, it seemed that she struck the right balance when it came to negative and positive ads there. she really saved much of her fire power for president obama, almost as if she was trying to leap frog above some of her competitors there. she really went very hard after the president. did that seem to resonate with the supporters? >> reporter: you know, it obviously didn't resonate enough because what they wanted was somebody who was quite a different candidate. covering michele bachmann in the united states congress, it is very interesting that she didn't get the kind of support that she thought she was going to get. john was pointing out the map and the tea party supporters. she started the so-called tea party caucus in the house of representatives. she very early on appealed to that contingent of people, tried to really be a part of them and be one of them because she saw that that was where the movement of the republican party was going. the fact that she didn't catch fire with them in this very important state of iowa is really perplexing, i think, because she was so known to be one of those tea party caucus people. the reality is the tea party caucus is a caucus in the house that doesn't effectively do very much except to have an important name and an important connection to this important movement out there in the republican party. that is really, as i said, fascinating and perfect flekt g i perfect flekting she didn't catch on. >> dana, we are waiting. we'll get right back to you as soon as that starts live. we'll squeeze in a quick break first. don't have the hops for s with your buddies? 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[ smack! ] [ smack! smack! smack! ] [ male announcer ] your favorite foods fighting you? fight back fast with tums. calcium rich tums goes to work in seconds. nothing works faster. ♪ tum ta tum tum tums we are soon going to be going to michele bachmann event. she is going to be announcing very shortly that she, we expect, is suspending her campaign after a poor showing in the iowa caulk causes. the first of the presidential race is over. the second less than a week away. we'll have highlights from the iowa caucuses. our correspondents, political analysts going to break down what is happening and what is next. going to have live reports from dan lothian. he is in manchester, new hampshire. christine romans in atlanta. going to talk with larry sabato at the center for politics. want to zero in with the next political battleground states. we are talking new hampshire holding the nation's next primary. south carolina's primary on saturday, january 21st. dan lothian brings us to manchester. mitt romney has a substantial lead in new hampshire polls. the raisin tense si fieg there after last night's tight three way. what do we expect in new hampshire, dan? >> reporter: well, i think, first of all, one thing that new hampshire voters pride themselves in is the fact that they are independent minded. they don't necessarily embrace what others have decided in other states, in particular iowa. we saw president obama in 2008 win in iowa but he did not win here in new hampshire. so, you know, one expert we talked to, one political expert told us we see the polling out there. we see what's coming out of iowa, but don't necessarily believe that new hampshire voters will simply go along with it. what does that mean? well, let's break it down. first of all, here for the last several months we have seen mitt romney, who is well known here because he ran in 2008, he has a home here, he's also the former governor of the state of massachusetts, which is right next door, he has consistently been leading in the polls, strong double digit leads. again, because he is not someone that they have to get introduced to but they know everything about what he stands on and also know him just as a person. again, we don't see much fluctuation when we look at the latest position from nbc, orc -- rather cnn orc where he was at 47% in december, continues to be in 47% according to those who were watching the caucuses last night. the only shift that we have seen is with senator santorum where he has now gone from an early december 5% to last night at 10%. his supporters we talked to believe that the momentum that he got coming out of iowa will translate here in new hampshire as voters get a chance to take a second look at him. they believe that he'll also get that bounce here, suzanne. >> dan, what do we think about jon huntsman? >> reporter: i think one thing that can come out of this is anything can happen. we've seen him. we were at one of his events last night as well. had he a large turnout. we were told one of the largest turnouts that he has received in quite some time. he's had about 150 events here in new hampshire, and his campaign believes that he can have that same surge. he has been going door to door. he has been getting out there and meeting people, and they believe he's starting to resonate with the voters of new hampshire. he could, according to them, have that surge and anything can happen as we have seen. >> dan lothian, thanks. i want to let you know in the bottom of your screen there you are watching the michele bachmann news conference supposed to start momentarily. looks like her supporters are all gathering behind the podium there. there she is. she's approaching the podium now. let's listen in. >> thank you, everyone, for being here today. i'm once again very proud to announce to you a good friend of mine and certainly great husband, marcus, michele bachmann. >> thank you, brad. thank you so much. thank you, everyone, for being here. i appreciate t. my name is michele bachmann. entrusted to every american is the responsibility to watch over our republic. you can look back from the time of the pilgrims to the time of william pen to the time of our founding fathers. all we have to do is look around because very clearly we are encompassed about with a great cloud of witnesses that bear witness to the sacrifices that were made to establish the united states and the precious principles of freedom that make it the greatest force for good that has ever been seen on the planet. every generation has served as the next stepping stone down the path of our liberty, and every day i'm reminded of that conviction that we have to the principles of freedom and justice by a painting. it's a painting that hang in the united states capitol. it's made by howard chandler christy scene at the signing of the constitution of the united states. it hangs in the east grand stairway of the united states capitol. every school child is familiar with this painting, but i've been privileged to see it on a regular basis doing my duties in congress. but never was the painting's poignant reminder more evident than on the evening of march 21st, 2010. that was the evening that obama care was passed