Republican, Iowa Caucuses | featured news

As Iowa Republicans take in the final appeals before tonight’s caucus voting, one major lesson the candidates will take away: Going negative works. An estimated $5.8 million was spent on television advertising in Iowa through Dec. 30, with $3.7 million financing negative ads, according to most recent data available from New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, a company that tracks advertising.

With Iowa deciding on their choice for GOP candidate tomorrow, Google’s timing is much better this election season to roll out their political news and trends trackers at Google Elections. In 2008, they had a similar offering but didn’t release it until just before the conventions.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who led Iowa and national polls in November, said Monday he did not expect to win Tuesday's Iowa caucuses, but will declare victory because he has survived an onslaught of negative advertising.

Iowa’s most influential poll shows that Tuesday’s caucuses are Mitt Romney’s to lose, but that Rick Santorum may be emerging as a last-minute and powerful threat.

It was standing room only as Mitt Romney briefly took time out from Iowa to campaign in Republican strongholds in New Hampshire, where he holds a wide lead approaching the state's first-in-the-nation primary.

After drawing relatively large crowds on her 99-county Iowa bus tour, Rep. Michele Bachmann on Friday had trouble attracting many voters to two campaign events.

With less than a week to go before Iowa caucuses, former Pennsylvania senator's strategy of traveling widely in the state appears to be paying dividends, as he shows up in polls as a top-tier candidate.

All across Iowa next Tuesday, tens of thousands of Republican voters will travel through a chilly Midwestern night to the warmth of a local church or gymnasium for caucus meetings to select presidential candidates, the first voting in the 2012 election campaign.

Mitt Romney swatted at Ron Paul on Wednesday, a shift for the candidate who has largely ignored the Texas congressman and a possible sign at the shifting nature of the race in the state that in less than a week holds the first presidential voting contest in the nation.

Ron Paul’s built-in networks of loyal backers from his 2008 presidential run have given him a decisive organizational advantage this election season... It was four years ago that Ross Witt, a soft-spoken electrical engineer at John Deere, overcame his natural discomfort with knocking on hundreds of his neighbors’ doors during dinnertime as a precinct coordinator for Ron Paul’s campaign.