It appears, at 2:18am Eastern time, that Mitt Romney has won the Iowa caucuses over Rick Santorum by a margin of 14 votes. That’s not 14%, but 14 votes. By my count, Romney led Santorum in only 25 of Iowa’s 99 counties. But most of those were in the state’s larger and more urban counties.
If you look for counties where the Romney/Santorum or Santorum/Romney margin was about 300 votes or more, you don’t find many. Santorum’s biggest margins were in heavily Dutch-American counties: Sioux (644 votes), Marion (339) and Mahaska (335). Also, Santorum beat Romney by 291 votes in Jasper County, whose county seat, Newton, has seen significant manufacturing job losses from Maytag’s move elsewhere; presumably Santorum’s pitch for eliminating the corporate tax on manufacturing companies struck a chord there.
Mitt Romney scored in the urban areas: Des Moines’s Polk County (1,505), where he did poorly in 2008, and next-door upscale Dallas County (577); Cedar Rapids’s Linn County (702) and Iowa City’s Johnson County (837) just to the south; Davenport’s Scott County (533); and, perhaps, Ames’s Story County (257, but there is some question as to what the real count was), plus heavily Catholic Dubuque County (209).
Any relevance to New Hampshire? Maybe. There are many fewer evangelical and bornagain Christians in New Hampshire than in Iowa, and certainly no equivalent to Sioux County and the other heavily Dutch-American counties. And a larger proportion of New Hampshire Republican primary voters are in relatively affluent towns with a lot of economic conservatives and relatively few cultural conservatives. You may hear a lot of talk about blue collar registered Republicans on the west side of Manchester near the old textile mills, but they have not been a very large proportion of registered Republicans since the 1970s.
Rick Santorum’s caucus night speech was an eloquent appeal to blue collar Republicans, and one which all the candidates might harken to. In 2008 Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire (and Massachusetts, a few weeks later) by carrying relatively downscale cities and towns, but the Democratic primary in New Hampshire is more tilted to that demographic than the Republican primary in New Hampshire.
