Aide in Iowa says caucus ‘hiccup’ cost Santorum
ANKENY (AP) — An Iowa adviser to Republican Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign said Thursday that the weeks it took the party to declare his candidate the winner after initially giving the win to Mitt Romney had a devastating effect on Santorum’s fundraising.
Candidates lavish attention on the Iowa caucuses because as the first contest in the presidential nominating process, it can give candidates a crucial burst of publicity if they win or exceed expectations. Santorum ultimately did both, but because the declaration of his victory came more than two weeks after the Jan. 3 caucuses, that boost was largely muted, said Jamie Johnson, a Webster County Republican and member of a panel studying problems with January’s presidential caucuses.
“The two-week wait in declaring Rick Santorum the official winner of the Iowa caucuses cannot be overstated in terms of its damage to his national effort to win the Republican nomination,” Johnson said. “He never got the bump Iowa would have given him.”
Johnson, Santorum’s outreach coordinator to conservative groups such as evangelical pastors, was the lone member of the panel to propose changes.
The party-run caucuses came under renewed scrutiny and criticism after Santorum was declared the winner by 34 votes on Jan. 20. That was a reversal from late on caucus night, when then-Iowa GOP Chairman Matt Strawn named Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, the winner by eight votes.
State party executive director Chad Olson attributed the change to individual errors in inputting data from the state’s 1,774 precincts.
Johnson stopped short of laying blame on Strawn and referred to the change in outcome to a “hiccup” forced by a photo finish out of more than 122,000 votes cast. Johnson proposed amending the rules to bar the party chairman from announcing a winner before the results are verified when the preliminary winning margin is less than 1 percent. He also suggested accelerating the certification deadline from the current two weeks to 72 hours.