Hello Iowa..

So today is the Republican Iowa caucus.

The master of US Psephology is Nate Silver (from Wiki) of the wonderful FiveThirtyEight.com.

He think’s it’s tight between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, with Rick Santorum slightly behind but with a bit of momentum.

It’s worth a look at the caucus process. From the IOWA GOP site we get:

First, the Presidential Poll is taken. At the beginning of your precinct caucus meeting, the Caucus Chairman will call for the Presidential Preference Poll. Any Presidential candidate or candidate representative will be given the floor to speak on behalf of his or her candidate, and then ballots will be passed out for the poll. You can write your preference on the ballot and the results will be reported to both the precinct caucus and the national media.

And from Wiki

In the Republican caucuses, each voter officially casts his or her vote by secret ballot. Voters are presented blank sheets of paper with no candidate names on them. After listening to some campaigning for each candidate by caucus participants, they write their choices down and the Republican Party of Iowa tabulates the results at each precinct and transmits them to the media.In 2008, some precincts used a show of hands or preprinted ballots.The non-binding results are tabulated and reported to the state party, which releases the results to the media. Delegates from the precinct caucuses go on to the county conventions, which choose delegates to the district conventions, which in turn selects delegates to the Iowa State Convention. Thus, it is the Republican Iowa State Convention, not the precinct caucuses, which selects the ultimate delegates from Iowa to the Republican National Convention. All delegates are officially unbound from the results of the precinct caucus, although media organizations either estimate delegate numbers by estimating county convention results or simply divide them proportionally.

My money’s on Romney….in Iowa anyway….

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