Iowa Winner?

According to all news reports, Mitt Romney won the Iowa presidential nomination caucus yesterday. Perhaps this calls for a new definition of winning. Although he actually got more votes than any of the other candidates, did he really notch a win? He received 30,015 votes which was 8 votes more than Rick Santorum’s 30,007 votes. What that does not tell us is the very real fact that 75% of the voters or over 90,000 Iowans said no to Mitt as president. Almost the same number of “Hawkeyes” said no to Rick Santorum. As far as the rest of the field is concerned, Newt had over 105,000 no votes and it is not worth the ink to show how badly everyone else fared. Looking a little closer at Romney’s win, from all appearances, Mitt spent over $3,300,000 to win the nomination in Iowa. Looking at this another way, he spent almost $110.00 per vote! He claims to be a fiscal conservative but does the drunken sailor expression seek at all apt? Carrying this to a presidential election where he would probably need over 60 million votes to defeat President Obama, he would have to spend $7.9 billion (YES! WITH A B!)dollars to win in November 2012 assuming he was actually the Republican candidate. Another way to look at 2012 is to repeat the reality that 75% of people in Iowa said no to Romney so what might happen in 2012? In the 2008 Iowa Presidential election, Barack Obama received over 828,000 votes in his defeat over John McCain. By anyone’s math, there is a large gap between 30,015 and 828,000. Perhaps there should be an option to vote NO and if NO gets more votes than anyone else it is mulligan time.