Straw Poll Results

The local ABC affiliate just broke in to Charlie's Angels (movie!) to report the Iowa GOP Straw Poll Results. Only 14,302 votes were cast--far fewer than expected and, I think, about 9,000 fewer than 8 years ago. (This is good news if the Iowa GOP raises less money than anticipated.)

Mitt Romney 4,516 (32%)
Mike Huckabee 2,587 (18%)
Sam Brownback 2,192 (15%)
Tom Tancredo 1,961 (14%)
Ron Paul 1,305 (9%)
Tommy Thompson 1,039 (7.3%)
Fred Thompson 203 (1.4%)
Rudy Giuliani 183 (1.3%)
Duncan Hunter 174 (1.2%)
John McCain 101 (0.7%)
Cameron Diaz 100 (0.7%)
John Cox 41 (0.3%)
Tiger Woods -7

Romney didn't do quite as well as expected. He poured a huge amount of money into this race. There were probably quite a number of people who rode his buses but didn't cast their votes for him. Huckabee is clearly a big winner here. This should aid his fundraising. Brownback didn't do so horribly that it should cause him to pull out. Paul and Tancredo both did a little better than I expected.

The only ones I could see pulling out after this are Tommy Thompson and Duncan Hunter. But if Brownback's numbers cause his fundraising to dry up then he could be gone as well.

Incidently, the announcement of the results was delayed by over an hour because of some problems with one of the voting machines. They had to count 1,500 votes by hand. There was a last-minute lawsuit this week by a group that was trying to force the leadership to use paper ballots and to count the votes in public. The lawsuit doesn't look so silly now.

Update: Don't know why this post disappeared for a half hour, but I'm putting it back up with a new time stamp.