Iowa Caucuses: And then there were 8

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has won the Iowa caucuses by only eight votes. Romney narrowly edged out former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Romney got 30,015 votes while Santorum received 30,007 votes.　

During the Iowa caucuses residents of Iowa State meet in precinct caucuses in 1,774 precincts and elect delegates to the corresponding county conventions. There are 99 counties in Iowa. These county conventions then select delegates for both Iowa's Congressional District Convention and the State Convention, which eventually choose the delegates for the presidential nominating conventions.

Romney was born on March 12, 1947. He was the 70th Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. While Governor he presided over a series of spending cuts and increases in fees that eliminated a projected $3 billion deficit. He also signed into law the Massachusetts health care reform legislation, which provided near-universal health insurance access via subsidies and state-level mandates and was the first of its kind in the nation.

Santorum has on numerous occasions made derogatory statements against homosexuals. In 2003, Santorum stated that he believed mutually consenting adults do not have a constitutional right to privacy with respect to sexual acts. He described the ability to regulate consensual homosexual acts as comparable to the states' ability to regulate other consensual and non-consensual sexual behaviour, such as adultery, polygamy, child molestation, incest, sodomy, and bestiality, whose decriminalization he believed would threaten society and the family, as they are not monogamous and heterosexual.