It was an Iowa-caucus night that came down to the wire, with former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Rick Santorum running neck-and-neck for first place in the first official contest leading up to the Republican presidential nomination.
At 1:36 a.m. Wednesday, the Republican Party of Iowa declared Romney the winner by just eight votes over Santorum, the dark-horse candidate who ran his campaign on a shoestring budget. With all of the state's 1,774 precincts reporting, Romney received 30,015 votes to Santorum's 30,007; both men received 25 percent of the vote.
Texas U.S. Representative Ron Paul finished third with 21 percent of the vote, followed by former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (13 percent), Texas Governor Rick Perry (10 percent), and Minnesota U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (5 percent).
Since 1972, no candidate who has finished worse than third in Iowa has gone on to win a major-party presidential nomination. Bachmann dropped out of the race on Wednesday after her sixth-place finish.
