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A Few More Tea Leaves

We're seeing a possible trend out of Iowa. Santorum's taking the west and Romney is doing better in the east. But since a greater portion of the vote is currently counted in the east, Santorum seems to have room to grow. So possible good sign to him. Too early to say with any certainty. We'll update you again after the next round of votes.

Josh Marshall

Long Night Blogging

Okay, as you can see in our live results we've got a very, very close race. At the moment, with 31% of the vote counted Mitt Romney is 4/10% ahead of Rick Santorum. And those three have traded the lead a few times tonight.

We're going to be looking closely at the county by county results and see what more light we can shed on this very murky picture.

What counties are you watching? And what do you make of the results so far?

We'll be reporting tea leaves from the county by county totals here at TPMLiveWire.

Josh Marshall

Okay, That's a Fail

So you remember how I told you there's an early and a late arriver wave in the entrance polls. Well, on CNN just now, Wolf Blitzer just announced they found a third wave. Awesome. Way to be on top of things. Anyway, the latest entrance numbers have Santorum moving up. Paul 24%, Romney 23%, Santorum 23%.

Josh Marshall

More Tea Leaves

Okay we've got the second round of 'entrance poll' results now. They're slightly different from the first round. The combination of early and late arrivers has Paul 24%, Romney 23%, Santorum 19%.

So those do seem to show Santorum isn't making it. But again, these are far from an exact science. They're not even as reliable as exit polls, which is a pretty low bar.

See our county by county results right here.

Josh Marshall

Reading the Tea Leaves

We're reading the (fairly unreliable) entrance poll tea leaves. Listening to the conversation on CNN, they just noted that 37% of the caucus-goers made their decision in the last "few days." 12% made up their mind today. Taking the total of 37%, that's 7% more than in 2008 when Mike Huckabee came out of nowhere and won.

In a climate of Santorumentum, that's got to be good news for Rick Santorum.

The real tell is going to be how much support gets mopped up by Bachmann, Perry, et al.

Late Update: The entrance poll for the early arrivals report like this: Paul 24, Romney, 24, Santorum 18, Gingrich 13. Again, these entrance polls have an imperfect record. And this is the first wave. There's another report for the late arrivers. That's still to come. A little disappointing for Santorum. But my recollection is that in 2008 Romney won the early arrivers too. And then of course he lost.

8:25 PM: Karl Rove's take on which counties to watch tonight. See our county by country live results here.

Josh Marshall

While We Wait For The Results

Video excerpts from the election night speeches of Mitt Romney and Ron Paul after the 2008 Iowa caucus, when Romney finished second and Paul fifth:

Read More →
David Kurtz

It's Omaha Beach!

The Iowa hype finally went through the roof today... and TPM's Michael Lester boiled down all the breathless chatter into a sizzling 100 seconds.

Thomas Lane
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