Late Night Breaking: Romney takes Iowa by 8 votes

Matt Strawn, Iowa Republican Party Chairman, confirming that Romney has taken Iowa by 8 votes…

I got these numbers live, no link yet:

Romney    30,015

Santorum   30,007

The earliest link I can find documenting Matt Strawn’s press briefing is this USA Today live blog link with this update:

2:34 a.m. ET

Iowa Republican Party Chairman Matt Strawn says Mitt Romney wins the Iowa caucuses by eight votes.

There was lots of confusion and this was perhaps ‘the closest election in American political primaries and caucuses’ (source the Very Serious David Gergen on CNN)….  some of us live-blogged the madness late into the night in the comments of BB’s Live Blog–for anyone who went to sleep before the results came in and wants to try to understand how it unfolded real time. (Warning: after about midnight or so, mostly it’s just me talking to myself…)

The mainstream punditry takeaway at this late hour is that this was a technical win for Romney but Santorum is the big star of the night, with Newt Gingrich on a personal mission to get Romney back for his attack ads against him (h/t Taylor Marsh).

Best line of the night goes to the Ragin Cajun:

James Carville: “There is one screaming, huge story here tonight and that is these Republicans just don’t want to vote for Mitt Romney. I mean it’s like you’re trying to give a dog a pill. They keep spitting it up. Now, they’re going to eat the pill, ’cause Romney’s going to eventually be the nominee, but…

And it’s the same thing he had before and he’s got a weaker field. It just don’t matter where he comes in, they don’t want to vote for him.”

See video clip of Carville’s commentary at Crooks and Liars.

I’m going to leave you with some Late Night Political Insomniac Jukebox…