They’ve tallied up the results at Johnston, Iowa’s precinct 481 and the big winner is…well, that’s not totally clear. But here are the basics: Out of 335 votes cast, Mitt Romney claimed 76; Rick Santorum had 75—and further down, Michele Bachmann had 15; Jon Huntsman trailed former Alabama supreme court judge Roy Moore, by a 2 to 1 margin (Moore had 2, Huntsman had 1). Huntsmentum, feel it.
Over at Santorum headquarters at the Stoney Creek Inn in Johnston, the mood is fairly jubilant. There’s a sizable crowd around the television, chanting “Rick! Rick! Rick!” (and the occasional ear-piercing whistle) whenever Fox News returns from commercial and updates its results. Steven Wagner’s monitoring the television, as the results begin to show, for the first time, Santorum, creeping into first place. He’s actually from DC—he flew to Iowa this weekend because Santorum’s a family friend. And as much as it might pain him to say it, he wasn’t quite sure Santorum was ever going to catch fire. “I was really waiting for Rick to make a move and was kind of perplexed as to why he hadn’t caught on,” he says. “I didn’t think that it was his year, in a structural sense. There was somehow this environment in Iowa that was preventing him from catching on.”
But now that he’s caught on, Wagner thinks there’s no stopping him. “I think Rick’s the kind of militant candidate that’ll give the president a run for his money. He means what he says to his bones.”
