Which Republican do you think will win the 2012 Iowa Caucus?

After I read your post Dan, I had to change mine. Good thing you put that there!

Paul's Iowa base seems to be the under-45 crowd. Which is notable since the seniors are trending to all the younger candidates.

I watched on WHYY some Paul town halls vs Romney. The age distributions among both groups is noticeable.

Paul also has a very strong anti-war stance and is promising sharp budgets cuts in foreign military ops and curtailing US military involvement overseas. That's got peacenicks drifting towards him.

He's got an argument. We spend loads on Defense with little to show for it with such aggressive spending that we blindly pour into it. Paul is also anti-Homeland Security.

he's also a goldbug, which ought to be enough to disqualify him.

but...

he's also the only one with a seriously attached following and in a caucus setting that is important. obama won the '08 primary in part because he took caucus rules seriously.

My money is on Wendell Willkie.

http://youtu.be/fDC_0vBZ75Y

RedState still can't get over it's love-affair with Rick Perry (their chosen one), but one post Monday was on-target:

Ten things to remember about the Iowa caucus.
Posted by Moe Lane (Diary)
Monday, January 2nd at 9:28PM EST
22 Comments
These are as generic as I can make them.

Politicians lie. Let me repeat that. Politicians lie. Don’t be so upset about it: so do you.

If the Iowa caucus was unimportant, people wouldn’t be obsessing over it.

If the Iowa caucus was all-important, we’d have it in August and combine it with the nominating convention.

When Candidate X’s supporter tells you that Candidate Y has a problem, s/he is not necessarily lying.
But, yeah, s/he is very likely being a jackass about it.

Money, buzz, crowds, speeches, debates, polls, commercials, zingers, phone banks, ads, leaflets, and hand-knitted tea cozies with the candidate’s campaign logo on them are great… but not as great as winning the precinct votes. Winning precincts is also the only metric that goes up on the scoreboard.

When it comes to elections, the saying is inverted: defeat has a thousand fathers, victory is an orphan.

Pollsters have reputations to protect, but they also know darn well that the acceptable margin of error in primary polling is larger than normal. Trying to figure out whether it’s the former or the latter point that applies in any given case is one of the things that makes life interesting.

Reagan’s fabled 11th Commandment does not include the clause “…so you must forgive an over-zealous supporter for being an jackass.” I mention this because many people seem to have that clause penciled in.

The Republican party has a large contingent (but not as large as it might think) of people who will answer the question “What are you going to do, sit this one out?” with a flat “Yes” if you push them too hard. If this happens, well, you were warned.

I believe it was Abraham Lincoln who noted that the idea is not to pray that God be on your side; but rather that you pray for help for you to stay on His.

From Gail Collins at the NYT:

Did I ever mention that Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped to the roof of the car? The dog’s name was Seamus. New Hampshire Republicans, if you can’t think of anybody to vote for on Tuesday, consider writing in the name Seamus when you go to the polls. Maybe we can start a boomlet.

It is strange how inevitable Mittens seems to be, now that 8 more people in Iowa showed up for him than the others.

There are roughly 55 million registered Republicans in the US. (quick google search) If my math is correct (it's probably not), Mittens domination of the primary was achieved with 0.000000145454545 percent of the vote.

if you are the national frontrunner and every other challenger's guns were focused on you the entire time and every time any one of them started to separate from the pack they fell back faster than they climbed, and the very first state to vote is one that is very hospitable to republicans who were not like you, and you still couldn't be knocked off I'd say that you pretty much earned your frontrunner status.