Garance Franke-Ruta

First, he came out for same sex marriage. Now a second bold move on behalf of a marginal group will dominate the conversation.

Is this how Obama's 2012 campaign is going to go? Boring economic speeches that have trouble breaking through, mixed with daring pronouncements in support of long-standing drives toward a more equitable society for some of America's most marginalized residents?

First President Obama came out in support for same-sex marriage in a move bolder than even many gay and lesbian activists expected. Now he's using the authority of the bully pulpit and the power of the regulatory state on behalf of young Americans born abroad but raised here, the illegal immigrants/undocumented Americans (how awful that there is no longer even any neutral term for such residents of this country, so partisan has the issue of their rights and future become) who would have been covered by the DREAM Act, should the U.S. Congress ever have seen fit to pass it. The executive order taking advantage of prosecutorial discretion in deportation cases will cover individuals brought to the United States through no fault of their own before the age of 16 who have lived in the U.S. at least five years and have no criminal record. They must also have earned a high school degree or served in the military, and still be under 30. Those who meet the criteria can get deportation proceedings (or the threat of same) deferred for two years and seek work permits.

Coming in the wake of the publication of a cover story in Time magazine on the plight of "undocumented Americans" by Jose Antonio Vargas, founder of Define American (and a former colleague of mine at The Washington Post), the move seems certain to electrify the presidential race and solidify the support of Hispanic Americans.

Vargas says the administration's move in support of "deferred action" on deportation will allow all but three of the 36 "undocumented Americans" pictured on the Time cover to "now be legal residents," though it won't impact him, since he's over the age cut off outlined in the new "deferred action" executive order. His full statement:

Today our country embraces upwards of one million young new Americans: DREAMers. They grew up here, they were educated here and they have so much to give back to the country they call home. With a stroke of President Obama's pen, our country lives up to its ideals and finds a fair and pragmatic solution, ending the nightmare of a generation of young people who are Americans in all but documents. Every social movement in the world is led by young people, and DREAMers are the beating heart of this growing immigrant rights movement. Like generations of immigrants before them, they have insisted on a better life not just for themselves and their families but for the country they love. This is a victory for DREAMers and the members of their underground railroad -- educators and faith leaders, friends and neighbors -- who have aided and supported them. The journey is far from over for the remaining millions of undocumented Americans like me -- at 31, I am past the age limit -- but this is a big, bold and necessary step in the road to citizenship. Thank you, President Obama, for this principled and courageous act.

The executive order does not constitute amnesty and won't provide the young people with a path to citizenship, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters on a conference call Friday morning.

"These young people do not represent a risk to safety or security," she said.

Wandering down an Internet rabbithole yesterday I wound up stumbling across the posters of Melissa Gruntkosky at Pressbound. This one, in particular struck me as the sort of thing the New York City Department of Health might be wanting to slap in a subway car.

It's not just about promoting catchwords like the "death tax" -- Republicans have also been fighting to suppress words deemed overly liberal.

Shutterstock

Bisexual sustainable development activists working to prevent climate change-related sea-level rise better watch out: Just about all the preceding words have been flagged by conservatives and Republicans as liberal buzzwords that need to be stricken from public conversation, according to a spate of recent news stories.

Sure, it's a time-honored GOP practice to seek to replace a perfectly good description, such as "the estate tax," with a more inflammatory phrase, but the new fight against liberal words does not appear to be seeking to replace them with an alternative so much as to deny the existence of a thing. Three examples:

1. "Bisexual" and "transgender."

The Boston Globe reported Tuesday that Romney's administration couldn't countenance these words during his later years in office, when he was preparing for a presidential bid:

Former governor Mitt Romney's administration in 2006 blocked publication of a state antibullying guide for Massachusetts public schools because officials objected to use of the terms "bisexual'' and "transgender'' in passages about protecting certain students from harassment, according to state records and interviews with current and former state officials.

Romney aides said publicly at the time that publication of the guide had been delayed because it was a lengthy document that required further review. But an e-mail authored in May of that year by a high-ranking Department of Public Health official -- and obtained last week by the Globe through a public records request -- reflected a different reason.

"Because this is using the terms 'bisexual' and 'transgendered,' DPH's name may not be used in this publication,'' wrote the official, Alda Rego-Weathers, then the deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

2. "Sea level rise" and "climate change."

The Virginian-Pilot reported Sunday that even the phrase once thought less loaded than "global warming" is now out of favor in Virginia, along with neutral descriptions of the type of water that could create flooding threats in the coastal state:

State lawmakers ran into a problem this year when recommending a study on rising sea levels and their potential impacts on coastal Virginia.

It was not a scientific problem or a financial one. It was linguistic.

They discovered that they could not use the phrases "sea level rise" or "climate change" in requesting the study, in part because of objections from Republican colleagues and also for fear of stirring up conservative activists, some of whom believe such terms are liberal code words....

State Del. Chris Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, who insisted on changing the "sea level rise" study in the General Assembly to one on "recurrent flooding," said he wants to get political speech out of the mix altogether.

He said "sea level rise" is a "left-wing term" that conjures up animosities on the right.

3. "Sustainable development."

This word hasn't been targeted directly so much as become a buzzword for an agenda the legislature of Alabama has now formally rejected. In May, it passed a law stating:

The State of Alabama and all political subdivisions may not adopt or implement policy recommendations that deliberately or inadvertently infringe or restrict private property rights without due process, as may be required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to "Agenda 21."

Now signed into law, "This bill, that would bar the state from taking over private property without due process, is intended to shelter Alabamians from the United Nations Agenda 21, a sustainable development initiative that some conservatives see as a precursor for the creation of a world government," Alabama GOP Executive Director T.J. Maloney said in a statement.

Know of more words conservatives have sought to strike from documents or consider buzzwords of an intolerable liberal agenda that require opposition in law? Please add them in the comments below.

The first lady joins the lifestyle-images heavy social network in advance of Fathers' Day in a soft-sell reach-out to women voters.

White House

Yes, that's the first lady of the United States of America in workout gear playing tug-of-war in the White House's Blue Room. "Jimmy was a gracious loser!" Michelle Obama wrote on Pinterest of her competitor, late night host Jimmy Fallon, with whom she sparred in February while promoting her "Let's Move!" fitness initiative.

As of February, women were 82 percent of active users on Pinterest, and Obama's participation in the lady-friendly social sharing site provides her husband's campaign with a soft-sell way to reach out to the middle-class women voters the Obama campaign has been targeting more pointedly with its political messages about "the war on women."

Besides: Ann Romney's been on Pinterest already since February, and it's about time the real Mrs. O started competing with such parody Pinterest accounts as this Mrs. Obama one.

It's time to set aside the stereotypes: Student government is actually a training-ground for eventual female members of Congress.

Is the difference between being a grind and having grit mainly a question of circumstance?

Sometimes I wonder about this. Female cussedness is presented as an admirable quality in such films and television shows as True Grit and Veep, but the ferocious determination of Tracy Flick in the 1999 movie Election remains a byword for, as my father once said of Hillary Clinton, "everything I find unattractive about American women."

I've been wondering about this in particular now that it is intern and summer seminar season in Washington. That means incredibly awkward cold calls from young women at random congressional offices, like the one who appeared to never have used the voice function on a phone before, but was trying to update the press list for her senator boss and called me earlier this week. Thankfully, it also means an influx of incredibly poised young women, such as the high school girls selected for Running Start's Young Women's Political Leadership program, who will be in town at the end of the month for trainings designed to help them think about themselves as leaders and maybe even run for office one day (full disclosure: I volunteered as a media trainer with the nonpartisan project last year).

Such projects are important because, as it turns out, being involved in the political arena at a young age is something that actually amps up the odds of life-long achievement in it. Thirteen of the last 20 presidents (including Obama) first ran for elective office at or before age 35 -- a fact Marie Wilson first noted in her book, Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World, and one pointed out to me by Barbara Palmer of Ohio's Baldwin-Wallace College at a breakfast in Washington last week.

Student government turns out to be as important a political training ground for women in Congress as are state legislatures, according to scholars at the the Women & Politics Institute at American University's School of Public Affairs. In 2009, they surveyed women in the U.S. House and Senate. Not everyone replied. But the results they found among those who did were just fascinating: "53.7% of respondents had served in some form of student government, in either high school, college or both." And, "of the women who served in student government, 37.9% did not go on to serve in their state's legislature, making student government a unique pathway to higher office for women."

That's kind of an amazing fact. It also means that it's worrisome that even as women have become the majority of college students, they have not kept pace when it comes to taking advantage of opportunities for young people to test out what it's like to run a campaign, and be voted on. If more young women participated in student government, more might go on to seek leadership positions in our real government.

Instead, by 2011, only 40 percent of student body presidents around the country were women, and the number is believed to be even lower when just considering four-year colleges -- not to mention top universities. "At the 50 colleges ranked highest by U.S. News & World Report, less than a third of student presidents are women," The Washington Post's Jenna Johnson reported last year. It's not uncommon for a school to be 60 percent female and have a student government that's 81 percent male, or a 62 percent female student body and 72 percent male student government.

Which brings me back to Tracy Flick. Grit and overconfidence are well-known as traits that predict success, where grit is defined as a psychological trait that allows people -- especially young people -- to buckle down and engage in "deliberate practice," a.k.a. unpleasant and boring tasks that are essential to acquiring expertise. In short, successful people know how to be grinds. They also tend to be convinced of themselves, even in the face of opposition.

I don't think I first saw Election until about a decade after it came out, because when it was released I was still living under an informal "avoid all Reese Witherspoon movies" policy (kind of a Tammy Metzler thing, I know). But when I did finally see it, I didn't get why Tracy Flick was seen as the villain of it.

Looked at objectively, the movie is about two middle-aged, sexually frustrated male high school teachers who become weirdly obsessed with a highly ambitious, well-organized, and hard-working female student from a not-very-prosperous single-parent home -- and how she doggedly pursues her dreams despite their efforts to thwart her and the costs to her own happiness.

First, one of the men seduces her -- against school rules about dating students and in violation of his own marriage vows and possibly the statutory rape laws of Nebraska, where the action is set -- and tries to derail her life suggesting she run away with him. Then, when he is appropriately fired by the school, his friend, played by Matthew Broderick, recruits a popular but sidelined male jock to run against her for student body president because he doesn't want to have to spend time with her as the academic adviser to the student government if she wins, alternately hating her for her ambition and wanting to bed her himself. This teacher fantasizes about Flick when he has sex with his wife, blames her for the breakup of his friend's marriage and career, and, after failing to push the jock into the presidency, throws out just enough of the ballots he's charged with counting to throw the contest to Flick's male competitor. A janitor who hates the teacher because he's an inconsiderate slob finds the tossed ballots and reveals the plot, causing Broderick's character to lose his job. Flick, having survived all this, as well as potential scandal of her own making after she tears down her opponent's candidate posters in a fit of frustration -- the jock's lesbian rebel sister saves Flick by take the blame, so she can get expelled and go to an all girls school -- ultimately gets the presidency. Flick goes on to Georgetown University and either a job or internship with her a Republican from Nebraska in D.C. The Broderick-played teacher continues to hate her irrationally.

That Elizabeth Dole, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin -- the three most prominent women to seek the presidency or vice presidency since Election came out -- have all been compared to Tracy Flick shows something of the movie's staying power, and the extent to which it created a negative cultural stereotype for discussing women and political ambition.

But it's no good if our only cultural reference point for women in student government is a negative one. If America's ever going to reach even a third women in Congress, it will need more women to get a taste for political combat on campuses -- and more Tracy Flicks making it all the way to Washington, D.C.

A provocative new study argues that Google searches for racial epithets can be synced with election results to reveal what Americans truly think.

Since 1982, political pollsters and Democrats have worried about the tendency of African American politicians to underperform on Election Day relative to their last known standing in non-partisan and credible polls. Dubbed the Bradley effect, after the Los Angeles mayor who lost his bid for the California governor's mansion despite being ahead in polls, or the Wilder effect, after the Virginia governor who narrowly became that state's first black executive after polls showed him with a sizable lead, the theory predicts that white voters' concern over appearing racist will cause them to overstate their willingness to vote for a black politician when queried by pollsters.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

In 2008, concern over the possibility of the effect contributed to Democratic pre-election anxiety (it's almost always Democrats who worry about it, since most African Americans who run in statewide general election contests are Democrats). "In recent days, nervous Obama supporters have traded worry about a survey -- widely disputed by pollsters yet voraciously consumed by the politically obsessed -- that concluded racial bias would cost Mr. Obama six percentage points in the final outcome," reported Kate Zernike in an October 2008 Week in Review piece in The New York Times. "He is, of course, about six points ahead in current polls. See? He's going to lose."

"How much we are under-representing people who are intolerant and therefore unlikely to vote for Obama is an open question," Andrew Kohut, the president of Pew Research Center, told the paper. "I suspect not a great deal, but maybe some. And 'maybe some' could be crucial in a tight election."

Obama, as we all know, went on to win, becoming the country's first black president and claiming victory with a margin of more than 7 percent over John McCain.

Now the concern that Obama might lose because he's black is back, thanks to the provocative article "The Effects of Racial Animus on a Black Presidential Candidate: Using Google Search Data to Find What Surveys Miss" (PDF), by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard University.

The New York Times' Sunday Review featured a fascinating infographic by Stephens-Davidowitz, and he unpacked his research in an accompanying blog post examining how he used Google searches done prior to the 2008 election to gauge racist sentiment in certain geographic areas and correlate that with Obama's eventual vote share.

Some key excerpts from the study itself:

How can we know how much racial animus costs black candidates if few voters will admit such socially unacceptable attitudes to surveys? I use a new, non-survey proxy for an area's racial animus: Google search queries that include racially charged language. I compare the proxy to an area's votes for Barack Obama, the 2008 black Democratic presidential candidate, controlling for its votes for John Kerry, the 2004 white Democratic presidential candidate. Previous research using a similar specification but survey proxies for racial attitudes yielded little evidence that racial attitudes affected Obama. Racially charged search, in contrast, is a robust negative predictor of Obama's vote share. My estimates imply that continuing racial animus in the United States cost Obama 3 to 5 percentage points of the national popular vote in 2008, yielding his opponent the equivalent of a home-state advantage country-wide.

In short, were there no racism in America, Stephens-Davidowitz appears to be arguing, Obama's strong finish would have been an epic blow-out.

Here's more about Stephens-Davidowitz's research method -- warning: racial epithets ahead -- and findings:

The baseline proxy that I use is the percentage of an area's total Google searches from 2004-2007 that included the word "nigger" or "niggers." I choose the most salient word to constrain data-mining. I do not include data after 2007 to avoid capturing reverse causation, with dislike for Obama causing individuals to use racially charged language on Google. My regression analysis includes 196 of 210 media markets, encompassing more than 99 percent of American voters.

The epithet is a common term used on Google. During the period 2004-2007, there were roughly the same number of Google searches that included the word "nigger(s)" as there were Google searches that included words and phrases such as "migraine(s)," "economist," "sweater," "Daily Show," and "Lakers." (Google data are case-insensitive.) The most common searches including the epithet (such as "nigger jokes" and "I hate niggers") return websites with derogatory material about African-Americans. The top hits for the top racially charged searches are nearly all textbook examples of antilocution, a majority group's sharing stereotype-based jokes using coarse language outside a minority group's presence. This was determined as the first and crucial stage of prejudice in Allport's (1979) classic treatise. From 2004-2007, the searches were most popular in West Virginia; upstate New York; rural Illinois; eastern Ohio; southern Mississippi; western Pennsylvania; and southern Oklahoma.

I find that racially charged search is a large and robust negative predictor of Obama's vote share. A one standard deviation increase in an area's racially charged search is associated with a 1.5 percentage point decrease in Obama's vote share, controlling for John Kerry's vote share. The statistical significance and large magnitude are robust to controls for changes in unemployment rates; home-state candidate preference; Census division fixed effects; prior trends in presidential voting; changes in Democratic House vote shares; swing state status; and demographic controls. The estimated effect is somewhat larger when adding controls for an area's Google search volume for other terms that are moderately correlated with search volume for "nigger" but are not evidence for racial animus. In particular, I control for searches including other terms for African-Americans ("African American" and "nigga," the alternate spelling used in nearly all rap songs that include the word) and profane language.

The results imply that, relative to the most racially tolerant areas in the United States, prejudice cost Obama between 3.1 percentage points and 5.0 percentage points of the national popular vote. This implies racial animus gave Obama's opponent roughly the equivalent of a home-state advantage country-wide. The cost of racial prejudice was not decisive in the 2008 election. But a four percentage point loss by the winning candidate would have changed the popular vote winner in the majority of post-war presidential elections....

A large cost of race in the general election is consistent with some scholars' estimates that, in light of the immensely unpopular incumbent Republican president, Obama substantially underperformed in the 2008 general election (Lewis-Beck et al., 2010; Tesler and Sears, 2010). It also can explain why white male Democratic candidates consistently outperformed Obama in hypothetical general election polls (Jackman and Vavreck, 2011). And it can explain why House Democrats' vote gains from 2004 to 2008 were significantly larger than Obama's gain relative to Kerry.

But for all that, it's not totally clear from Stephens-Davidowitz's findings what the Electoral College impact of racism was or would be. The popular vote is obviously critical in a presidential election, but it's mediated. It cannot come as a shock to anyone that Obama is not seen as the cat's meow in places like West Virginia, southern Mississippi or southern Oklahoma. And even a large racial cost in those states would have had no impact on Obama's general election prospects, because he was always going to lose those states. Meanwhile, racism in places like upstate New York and rural Illinois, as documented in Google searches, may be culturally and politically significant and yet still pretty much irrelevant to Obama's reelection prospects, as any Democrat who's so weak he can't even win New York or Illinois is someone heading into a blow-out loss nationwide.

Where racial animus might intersect with the Electoral College to matter -- eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, parts of Florida -- on Election Day is something to contemplate. Still, if Obama loses, it will be hard to argue that those well-known swing states and regions don't also have unusually significant economic problems that might turn them away from any incumbent president running on the historically weak fundamentals Obama is. Some researchers will point to Obama's race as a factor if he loses -- but even more will point to the biggest and best-know electoral predictor of all: the strength of the economy.

Surveys show a shockingly high fraction think a quarter of the country is gay or lesbian, when the reality is that it's probably less than 2 percent.

One in ten. It's the name of the group that puts on the Reel Affirmations gay and lesbian film festival in Washington, D.C., each year. It's the percent popularized by the Kinsey Report as the size of the gay male population. And it's among the most common figures pointed to in popular culture as an estimate of how many people are gay or lesbian.

But what percentage of the population is actually gay or lesbian? With the debate over same-sex marriage again an emerging fault line in American political life, the answer comes as a surprise: A lower number than you might think -- and a much, much, much lower one than most Americans believe.

In surveys conducted in 2002 and 2011, pollsters at Gallup found that members of the American public massively overestimated how many people are gay or lesbian. In 2002, a quarter of those surveyed guessed upwards of a quarter of Americans were gay or lesbian (or "homosexual," the third option given). By 2011, that misperception had only grown, with more than a third of those surveyed now guessing that more than 25 percent of Americans are gay or lesbian. Women and young adults were most likely to provide high estimates, approximating that 30 percent of the population is gay. Overall, "U.S. adults, on average, estimate that 25 percent of Americans are gay or lesbian," Gallup found. Only 4 percent of all those surveyed in 2011 and about 8 percent of those surveyed in 2002 correctly guessed that fewer than 5 percent of Americans identify as gay or lesbian.

Such a misunderstanding of the basic demographics of sexual behavior and identity in America has potentially profound implications for the acceptance of the gay-rights agenda. On the one hand, people who overestimate the percent of gay Americans by a factor of 12 seem likely to also wildly overestimate the cultural impact of same-sex marriage. On the other hand, the extraordinary confusion over the percentage of gay people may reflect a triumph of the gay and lesbian movement's decades-long fight against invisibility and the closet.

"My first reaction to that, aside from a little chuckle, is that it's actually a sign of the success of the movement for LGBT rights," said Stuart Gaffney, a spokesman for the group Marriage Equality USA. "We are a small minority, and we will never have full equality without the support of the majority, and a poll like that suggests the majority is extremely aware of their gay neighbors, coworkers, and friends."

In recent years, as homosexuality has become less stigmatized, pro-gay rights groups have come around to acknowledging that a smaller percent of people identify themselves as gay than some of the early gay rights rhetoric claimed, based on Alfred Kinsey's 1948 report, "Sexuality in the Human Male." His survey research on non-random populations in the immediate post-World War II period concluded that 10 percent of men "were predominantly homosexual between the ages of 16 and 55" and that 37 percent had had at least one homosexual experience in their lives, but did not get into questions of identity per se.

Contemporary research in a less homophobic environment has counterintuitively resulted in lower estimates rather than higher ones. The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, a gay and lesbian think tank, released a study in April 2011 estimating based on its research that just 1.7 percent of Americans between 18 and 44 identify as gay or lesbian, while another 1.8 percent -- predominantly women -- identify as bisexual. Far from underestimating the ranks of gay people because of homophobia, these figures included a substantial number of people who remained deeply closeted, such as a quarter of the bisexuals. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of women between 22 and 44 that questioned more than 13,500 respondents between 2006 and 2008 found very similar numbers: Only 1 percent of the women identified themselves as gay, while 4 percent identified as bisexual.

Higher numbers can be obtained when asking about lifetime sexual experiences, rather than identity. The Williams Institute found that, overall, an estimated 8.2 percent of the population had engaged in some form same-sex sexual activity. Put another way, 4.7 percent of the population had wandered across the line without coming to think of themselves as either gay or bisexual. Other studies suggest those individuals are, like the bisexuals, mainly women: The same CDC study that found only 1 percent of women identify as lesbian, for example, found that 13 percent of women reported a history of some form of sexual contact with other women.

"Estimates of those who report any lifetime same-sex sexual behavior and any same-sex sexual attraction are substantially higher than estimates of those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual," the Williams Institute's Gary J. Gates concluded.

These numbers are significant because identity -- and not behavior -- is the central determinant of whether or not someone will seek a same-sex marriage. A straight woman who makes out a couple of times with a female friend in college is not going to seek a same-sex marriage, nor is a guy who fooled around once with a male friend while drunk in high school. Neither individual is demographically relevant to the question of how often same-sex marriages will occur. And it's not clear at all what fraction of bisexuals will seek out same-sex marriages.

Overall, there have been fewer than 75,000 state-sanctioned same-sex marriages in the United States since they began to be permitted less than a decade ago, according to an estimate by Marriage Equality USA. Over the eight years since Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in May 2004, 18,462 same-sex couples married in the Bay State. Another 18,000 were estimated to have wed in California during the few months before Proposition 8 passed in 2008, banning future ones; those marriages remain on the books, as the proposition was not retroactive. It's not totally clear how many same-sex marriages have taken place in New York, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia, the other jurisdictions where it is permitted.

Of course, gays aren't the only minority population that has an outsized place in the public imagination. Americans also "vastly overestimate the percentage of fellow residents who are foreign-born, by more than a factor of two, and the percentage who are in the country illegally, by a factor of six or seven," according to a 2012 Wall Street Journal report on the social science of estimating minority groups. In 1993, a group of political scientists reported in Public Opinion Quarterly that "The extent to which minority populations are perceived as a kind of threat is ... related to perceived proportions, though the direction of causality cannot be determined." Correcting the misimpressions about the size of a minority group hasn't been proved to have much impact on beliefs about them in the short-term, but that doesn't mean that they might never.

One thing's for sure: it's hard to imagine the fact that so many think the country is more than a quarter gay or lesbian has no impact on our public policy.

The Democratic Senate candidate can't back up family lore that she is part Indian -- but neither is there any evidence that she benefited professionally from these stories. Reuters

Elizabeth Warren is not a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Elizabeth Warren is not enrolled in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

And Elizabeth Warren is not one of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee.

Nor could she become one, even if she wanted to.

Despite a nearly three week flap over her claim of "being Native American," the progressive consumer advocate has been unable to point to evidence of Native heritage except for a unsubstantiated thirdhand report that she might be 1/32 Cherokee. Even if it could be proven, it wouldn't qualify her to be a member of a tribe: Contrary to assertions in outlets from The New York Times to Mother Jones that having 1/32 Cherokee ancestry is "sufficient for tribal citizenship," "Indian enough" for "the Cherokee Nation," and "not a deal-breaker," Warren would not be eligible to become a member of any of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes based on the evidence so far surfaced by independent genealogists about her ancestry.

"These are my family stories," Warren has said. "This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mammaw and my pappaw." But so far she and her campaign have been unable to establish that her family lore about being part Native American is anything more than one of the most widely shared family myths known to American genealogical researchers, myths especially prevalent in Warren's home state of Oklahoma, the state with the highest percent of Native Americans in the nation and one where the Cherokee are the largest minority group.

"There's a running joke in Indian country: If you meet somebody who you wouldn't necessarily think they're Native, but they say they're Native, chances are they'll tell you they're Cherokee," said Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton, a spokesperson for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, which with more than 300,000 citizens is the largest Cherokee tribe.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society backtracked on Warren's ancestry, saying it has "no proof" of Cherokee descent.

Warren, now running as a Democrat to unseat incumbent Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, has been embroiled in the controversy since reports surfaced that she described herself as a minority in a law school directory and was touted as a Native American faculty member while tenured at Harvard Law School in the mid-1990s. Warren has described herself as having Cherokee and Delaware Indian ancestry. Brown's campaign has seized on the story to raise questions about whether Warren misled Harvard or sought to use distant Native American ties for professional gain, and hammered on the propriety of a blonde, blue-eyed white woman describing herself as a minority. But the biggest question raised during the fracas is the one no one has been able to answer: whether she has Native American ancestry at all.

Warren has doubled down on her description of her background and dismissed suggestions she was ever an affirmative action hire as preposterous. "I'm proud of my Native American heritage," she said Monday in an appearance on CNN. "I'm proud of my family."

Her inability to name any specific Native American ancestor has kept the story alive, though, as pundits left and right have argued the case. Supporters touted her as part Cherokee after genealogist Christopher Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Society said he'd found a marriage certificate that described her great-great-great-grandmother, who was born in the late 18th century, as a Cherokee. But that story fell apart once people looked at it more closely. The Society, it turned out, was referencing a quote by an amateur genealogist in the March 2006 Buracker & Boraker Family History Research Newsletters about an application for a marriage certificate:

Lynda Smith said, "When Neoma's son William J. Crawford married his second wife Mary LONG in Oklahoma, he stated on his marriage application that his parents were Johnathan Houston Crawford and O. C. Sarah Smith and that his mother was Cherokee Indian."

No one has surfaced that document, and there's some reason to believe it may not exist. Lynda Smith later wrote that she does not believe she ever saw it herself, according to a report by amateur genealogist Michael Patrick Leahy, who has helped lead a full court press from the right on the Warren ancestry story, along with other conservative outlets such as the Boston Herald and the blog Legal Insurrection. (Smith declined a request for comment.)

The New England Historic Genealogical Society backtracked on Warren's ancestry in a statement Tuesday, saying the group has "no proof that Elizabeth Warren's great-great-great-grandmother O.C. Sarah Smith either is or is not of Cherokee descent" and that the Society "has not expressed a position on whether Mrs. Warren has Native American ancestry, nor do we possess any primary sources to prove that she is."

The Boston Globe, which had taken the Society's earlier statements as confirmation of Warren's Cherokee heritage ("Document ties Warren kin to Cherokees"), issued a sniffy correction Tuesday about the "1894 document that was purported to list Elizabeth Warren's great-great-great grandmother as a Cherokee," noting that "Neither the society nor the Globe has seen the primary document, whose existence has not been proven."

But even were such a document to be found, Warren would not be eligible to enroll as a Cherokee based on it alone. To begin with, the Cherokee Nation doesn't accept marriage licenses as documentation of Cherokee ancestry -- let alone a document described as an application for a marriage license by a descendent of the individual claimed as Cherokee.

"Marriage licenses don't cut it," said Krehbiel-Burton of the Cherokee Nation.

Further, to enroll as a member of the Cherokee Nation, an individual must have had a direct ancestor listed among the more than 101,000 people enrolled on the "Final Rolls of the Citizens and Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory" between 1898-1914, now known as the Dawes Rolls. The Cherokee Nation is very strict about this, even keeping descendants of siblings of men and women on the rolls out of the tribe, as well as descendents of Cherokees who were living out of the area at the time the lists were drawn up in what was then Northeastern Oklahoma.

"If she does not have an ancestor listed on the Dawes Rolls, she cannot be considered Cherokee through this tribe," explained Lydia Neal, a processor with the registrar's office of the Cherokee Nation.

O.C. Sarah Smith died long before the rolls were drawn up, too far in the past to make Warren eligible for membership in the tribe (assuming Smith was Cherokee).

No direct-line relatives of Warren are listed on the Dawes Rolls, according to Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak (the doubled name is not a typo), the independent genealogist who identified Michelle Obama's slave ancestors in 2009 in a project with The New York Times.

"The Dawes Rolls don't lend support to [Warren's] claim," she told The Atlantic.

The Eastern Band of the Cherokee, for their part, have since 1963 required individuals to be at least 1/16 Cherokee to enroll -- and also to have "a direct lineal ancestor" on "the 1924 Baker Roll of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians." Even were Smith discovered to be Cherokee, Warren would not be eligible to join the tribe as someone who also lacks a direct-line ancestor on the 1924 rolls, according to Smolenyak's research.

"If she has Native American ancestry, it's likely quite a ways back and not reflected in more contemporary resources," Smolenyak said.

"In her immediate pedigree there is no one who is listing themselves as not white," the New England Historic and Genealogical Society's Child told the Boston Herald after looking at her maternal line in late April.

And while many have pointed out that the current principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, Bill John Baker, is only 1/32 Cherokee, his background is not like Warren's; he was "born and raised in Cherokee County" and is a direct descendant of "Nancy Walker Osage, an early Tahlequah business owner and Cherokee Healer" listed on the Dawes Rolls.

The difference between him and Warren is he has a direct-line ancestor clearly documented as a Cherokee whom he can name. So far, Warren has only been able to point to family lore.

Asked if Warren were claiming O.C. Sarah Smith or any other ancestor was Cherokee or if the campaign or Warren had reached out to a genealogist to research Warren's background, Warren spokesperson Alethea Harney said she'd have to look into it, then declined to answer the questions in a follow-up email exchange.

None of this to say that a Cherokee citizen couldn't look like Warren. Though it confounds many people's expectations, the Cherokee Nation considers being Cherokee as much an ethnicity as anything racial, and given the tribe's centuries-long history of intermarriage there are many Cherokee citizens today who do not look stereotypically Native American. As well, "there are a lot of folks who are legitimately Cherokee who are not eligible for citizenship," said Krehbiel-Burton, because, for example, their ancestors lived in distant states or territories when the rolls were drawn up, or because they are direct descendants of people left off the rolls for other reasons.

Fractional Native American ancestry is quite hard to prove to the standards of the U.S. government, which in many ways acts as the ultimate "birther" in this regard. Percentage of ancestry or "blood quantum" -- the creepy and antique-sounding term used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which certifies it for two of the three Cherokee tribes -- is recognized by the Bureau based on original documents (such as birth certificates, Census records, and death certificates) through something called a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, or CDIB.

Warren would need to be certified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as at least 1/16 Eastern Cherokee on a CDIB to be eligible to join the Eastern Cherokee. The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee has an even stricter enrollment cut-off: "a minimum blood quantum requirement of one quarter (1/4) degree Keetoowah Cherokee blood" documented via a CDIB plus a direct descent from someone on the Dawes Rolls. Tribal citizenship standards are set by the tribes themselves, and not the U.S. government.

Warren has never attempted to join a tribe and had no documentation of her Native ancestry claim before the controversy broke, Harney told William A. Jacobson, a Cornell Law School professor, in late April. Instead, Warren has cited the sayings of her Aunt Bea, who was given to complaining that Warren's maternal grandfather who "had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do" had not passed them on to her.

To be sure, the absence of readily located evidence of Native ancestry outside the oral tradition does not mean that Warren has no Native American ancestry. Genealogy is a complicated field, where firm answers are hard to come by quickly. Proof of distant Native American ancestry could yet surface, were Warren to hire a genealogist to do a thorough dive into her own background while she works on riding out the political storm.

But a lack of Native ancestry despite the family stories she's heard all her life would also be consistent with one of the most common genealogical myths in the United States.

"Many more Americans believe they have Native ancestry than actually do (we always suspected this, but can now confirm it through genetic testing)," said Smolenyak in an email. "In fact, in terms of wide-spread ancestral myths, this is one of the top two (the other being those who think their names were changed at Ellis Island). And someone who hails from Oklahoma would be even more prone to accept a tale of Native heritage than most."

She added: "There's also a tendency to accept what our relatives (especially our elders) tell us."

As for Warren, "I can't confirm or refute Cherokee heritage without extensive research," she said. "All I can say is that Ms. Warren's scenario is a wildly common one -- minus the public scrutiny, of course."

Should the genealogists be unable to find supporting documents, Warren could also quietly pursue familial DNA testing, which might confirm Native American ancestry, even if records of individual ancestors or their specific tribal affiliations have been lost to the mists of time. Her one-time Harvard University colleague Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has promoted such efforts as part of helping African Americans learn more about their mixed ancestry, hosting a series of shows on PBS featuring famous figures tracking down their forebears using genetics and genealogy. (He's also pointed out that many African Americans erroneously believe they have Native American ancestors, especially Cherokee ones, making it "the biggest myth in African-American genealogy.") DNA ancestry tests are not dispositive, and even a positive result would not be useful for tribal affiliation or CDIB purposes. But it would silence her critics, and -- more importantly -- it would help her learn whether what she had spent her life thinking she knew about herself and her family was true.

"Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born," Warren told the Boston Herald in early May. "These are my family stories, I have lived in a family that has talked about Native American and talked about tribes since I was a little girl."

Many prominent figures in American life learn, once the eye of the national press alights on them, that they are not the people who they always thought -- or said -- they were. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, for example, grew up thinking she came from a Catholic Czech family. It was not until she joined the U.S. Cabinet that she learned her parents -- not her great-great-great-grandmother, but her own parents -- were Jewish refugees who had converted and misled her about her ancestry after losing their families in the Holocaust. "This was obviously a major surprise to me. I have never been told this," she said in 1997, after the Washington Post broke the news. "The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up," she said.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio spent years describing himself as the "son of exiles" from Castro's Cuba, but the Post reported that "documents show that Rubio's parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than two-and-a-half years before Castro's forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power." "I'm going off the oral history of my family," Rubio said in explaining the discrepancy.

Public scrutiny allowed New Mexico Gov. Susanna Martinez to close off a potentially damaging story-line when it was discovered that a Mexican grandfather suspected of having been an undocumented immigrant was in fact a lawfully admitted 1918 entrant who obtained U.S. citizenship in 1942. Questions had been raised about him after news reports revealed he was marked AL for "alien" on the 1930 Census, and people jumped to conclusions that this meant he was an "illegal alien" -- illustrating just how much trouble incomplete genealogical research can cause for political actors.

But sometimes genealogy also confirms family stories. Michelle Obama in 2009 learned a great deal more about the slave ancestors she always knew she must have had, and Smolenyak and The New York Times were able to "substantiate what Mrs. Obama has called longstanding family rumors about a white forebear."

Warren's story has become so politicized and such a hot potato in her race to unseat Brown that she'll be in a sticky situation no matter what she finds.

The best argument she's got in her defense is that, based on the public evidence so far, she doesn't appear to have used her claim of Native American ancestry to gain access to anything much more significant than a cookbook; in 1984 she contributed five recipes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook published by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, signing the items, "Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee."

Warren, who graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 and got her law degree from Rutgers University in 1976, did not seek to take advantage of affirmative action policies during her education, according documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Boston Globe. On the application to Rutgers Law School she was asked, "Are you interested in applying for admission under the Program for Minority Group Students?'' "No," she replied.

While a teacher at the University of Texas, she listed herself as "white." But between 1986 and 1995, she listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty; the University of Pennsylvania in a 2005 "minority equity report" also listed her as one of the minority professors who had taught at its law school.

The head of the committee that brought Warren to Harvard Law School said talk of Native American ties was not a factor in recruiting her to the prestigious institution. Reported the Boston Herald in April in its first story on Warren's ancestry claim: "Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, a former U.S. Solicitor General who served under Ronald Reagan, sat on the appointing committee that recommended Warren for hire in 1995. He said he didn't recall her Native American heritage ever coming up during the hiring process.

"'It simply played no role in the appointments process. It was not mentioned and I didn't mention it to the faculty,' he said."

He repeated himself this week, telling the Herald: "In spite of conclusive evidence to the contrary, the story continues to circulate that Elizabeth Warren enjoyed some kind of affirmative action leg-up in her hiring as a full professor by the Harvard Law School. The innuendo is false."

"I can state categorically that the subject of her Native American ancestry never once was mentioned," he added.

That view was echoed by Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe, who voted to tenure Warren and was also involved in recruiting her.

"Elizabeth Warren's heritage had absolutely no role in the decision to recruit her to Harvard Law School," he told the Crimson. "Our decision was entirely based on her extraordinary expertise and legendary teaching ability. This whole dispute is fabricated out of whole cloth and has no connection to reality."

And that's the second arena where an absence of evidence should have some weight. If there's no easily located evidence that Warren has Native American ancestry, there's also no evidence Warren used her family story to boost herself into a Harvard job.

A huge tell -- beyond the flat denials of two of the men who brought her to the school -- is that Warren's ancestry was not touted in 1995 in the Harvard Crimson as the Law School's first Native American hire, despite the ethnic studies movement's gathering force on the college's campus at the time and continued controversy over the lack of diversity at the law school (as highlighted at a protest involving Prof. Derrick Bell and law school student Barack Obama in 1991). The Crimson article on Warren was titled simply, "Woman Tenured at Law School."

"Liz Warren is a spectacular addition to our faculty," Law School Dean Robert Clark told the Crimson. "She is a leading scholar in the fields of bankruptcy and commercial law, and she is one of the rare legal academics to have devoted herself to a large-scale empirical research project of great relevance to legal policy making."

Compare that to the Crimson editorial that greeted Lani Guinier just three years later, which heralded her as "the first female African-American professor in the 181-year history of HLS." While this article also repeated the claim about Warren's ethnicity -- "Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American," the '98 piece said -- that information had so little penetrated the consciousness of legal circles that Guinier was quoted in the very same article saying, "Though I am the first woman of color to join the tenured faculty, I know that I will not be the last, and this is important to me." Dean Clark said he felt hiring her would "attract other top scholars of diverse backgrounds." He made no similar statement upon Warren's hire.

What Law School spokesman Michael Chmura was doing when he told the Crimson in 1996 and the Fordham Law Review in 1997 that Warren was Native American is a question for the university, not the Warren campaign. And the university is duly being pressed on that question and others about Warren's time there. (Massachusetts Republican Party Chairman Robert A. Maginn Jr., an alumnus of Harvard Law, has called on the university to do an internal investigation into whether Warren misled the university about her heritage.)

The challenge for Warren will be to withstand an ongoing barrage of attacks on the topic that seek to undermine perceptions about her character and honesty. "That Warren allowed Harvard to hold her up as an example of their commitment to diversity in the hiring of historically disadvantaged communities is an insult to all Americans who have suffered real discrimination and mistreatment, and Warren should apologize for participating in this hypocritical sham," Jim Barnett, the campaign manager for Brown said when the story broke.

Warren's campaign has tried to keep its head down and fight around the edges of the story, which it's called a distraction from the issues Massachusetts voters care about. Senate candidates have survived far more potentially damaging controversies and gone on to win. But the longer the questions about Warren linger, the harder it will be for voters to feel like they know who she really is.

Lest we forget in the uproar provoked by Vice President Biden's remarks, George W. Bush's former vice president was out front on this issue years ago.

Speaking at the Gerald R. Ford Foundation journalism awards at the National Press Club in July 2009, former Bush Vice President Dick Cheney took a stand in favor of recognizing gay marriages at the state level in response to the question, "Is some form of legalized gay marriage inevitable in the United States?"

Cheney replied:

Well, I think that freedom means freedom for everyone. As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something that, uh, we have lived with for a long time, in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute that governs this, I don't support. I do believe that historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue, and I think that's the way it ought to be handled today, that is on a state-by-state basis. Different states will make different decisions. But I don't have any problem with that. I think people ought to get a shot at that.

Worth recalling in light of the furor over Vice President Biden's remarks on Meet the Press on Sunday that he was "absolutely comfortable" with gay marriage.

He may have won 41 percent of the vote in the state's Democratic primary, but the odds he'll get any delegates at the Democratic convention are basically zero.

Keith Judd, a.k.a. Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution Inmate No. 11593-051 from Texarkana, Texas, won 41 percent of the vote in yesterday's Democratic presidential primary in West Virginia against incumbent President Obama.

This begs many questions, from why Obama fared so poorly in the state -- the short answer is coal -- to his ongoing issues with Appalachia -- see Salon's 2008 piece, "Why don't those hillbillies like Obama?" -- but chief among them is a more prosaic and technical concern: How does a federal inmate and convicted felon wind up on a ballot, anyhow?

West Virginia law clearly bars any person "currently under conviction for a felony, including probation or parole, or a court ruling of mental incompetence" from voting, running for or holding office, according to the Secretary of State's office. Judd is serving a sentence of 17 and a half years following a 1999 conviction for extortion involving the University of New Mexico.

So how did Judd position himself to potentially collect delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. -- as would accrue to anyone who won more than 15 percent of the Democratic vote and filled out the appropriate paperwork?

"He filled out the certificate of announcement. I don't mean to sound flip or anything," explained Jack Glance, a spokesman for the West Virginia Secretary of State's Office. Judd also paid a $2,500 ballot-access filing fee.

"We do not have the authority to determine eligibility of candidates," he said. "That is up to the courts, so somebody has to challenge somebody's eligibility to hold office."

Whether or not someone is under conviction "is not part of the form that you fill out to run for office. Now if it comes out that you are under conviction, someone can challenge the candidacy. But no one challenged this candidacy," he said.

That doesn't mean Judd is going all the way to Charlotte. The Democratic Party of West Virginia is pretty certain he'll still be ruled ineligible, thanks to a failure to file the appropriate paperwork on behalf of delegates before party deadlines.

"It's not likely that Mr. Judd will earn any delegates to the national convention," said Derek Scarbro, executive director of the West Virginia Democratic Party. "First and foremost no one filed to run as a delegate for him" before the filing deadline of 5pm Tuesday. "And there's no fee or anything," he added.

"And then there's also some question of whether he would have been eligible to earn any delegates any way," Scarbro continued, as Judd appears not to have made the required filings with the state and national parties naming a delegation chair for his campaign. And that deadline is long past.

Scarbro blamed Judd's appearance on the ballot on the state, saying, "The ballot access rules in West Virginia are governed by the state, so that's really a question for the Secretary of State's office and they will tell you that the law in West Virgina does not prohibit people in his situation from getting on the ballot." Or, as West Virginia Democratic Party chair -- a volunteer position -- Larry Puccio put it: "I do not know how he would be able to participate on the ballot... that's not my field of expertise."

But that doesn't answer the question of why the Obama reelection campaign did not challenge Judd's ballot eligibility; this wasn't even the first time he's faced off against Obama, having also appeared on the Idaho Democratic primary ballot in 2008. An email to the campaign asking why it did not seek to get him tossed before the primary was not immediately returned.

Perhaps no one cared because West Virginia is pretty much a lost cause for Obama this fall.

Republican John McCain won the state in 2008, and Hillary Clinton took it during the Democratic primaries earlier that year. A January 2012 Gallup poll found the president with 33 percent approval rate in the state, and the state's Democratic U.S. Senator has yet to commit to voting for the president's reelection.

In selecting Tampa, the Republican Party has chosen a city nearly rivaling Buffalo as a home to the economically gloomy.

Mitt Romney holds a newser under a tree outside his campaign offices in Tampa. Reuters

Well, that sounds like a fun time.

The Republican National Convention nominating Mitt Romney (really, the GOP primary is all over but the shouting) this August will take place in America's second-most economically pessimistic metropolitan area, according to a new poll from Gallup.

That survey of perceived economic well-being in 2011, based on more than 80,000 interviews across the nation, found the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Fla., area to be surpassed in its total lack of economic confidence only by Buffalo-Niagara Falls, N.Y.

Washington, D.C., by contrast, leads the nation as the most economically confident metro area. Thirty-eight percent of D.C.-area residents thought the economy last year was improving, while 56 percent thought it was getting worse. Meanwhile, 70 percent of Tampa-area residents thought the economy was getting worse, according to the survey.

It's pretty standard for the host cities of the conventions to become characters in the coverage from them. To the extent that Tampa and its surroundings remain economically depressed by summer, full of struggling people and underwater mortgages, look for the RNC convention site to become an exhibit for the prosecution in the case again President Obama's stewardship of the economy that Romney and the Republicans will be making on the national stage in August. (Of course, there will also be room for plenty of Democratic pushback as rapid responders seek to contrast the inevitable lavish lobbyist- and industry-funded convention parties with the hard times just around the corner.)

Either way, unromantic and sullen Tampa is looking like a smart political choice for the GOP this cycle -- and like a city that will be especially grateful for the economic boon the political conventions inevitably provide.

We gathered updates during the evening of Mitt Romney's victory in the Sunshine State. Full results can be viewed at the Florida Election Watch site maintained by the Florida Department of State Division of Elections.

9:30 p.m. Ron Paul's turn. "Well, if enthusiasm wins elections, we wins hands down," Paul says, drawing boos when he adds that he called Romney to congratulate him. The boos turned to cheers when Paul added that he'd said, "We would see him soon in the caucus states!" Paul is now in third place in the delegate count, he noted; when you have an "irate, tireless minority," you do very well in caucus states.

9:10 p.m. A surprisingly upbeat and measured Newt Gingrich speaks and praises the positive spirit of the voters (in implicit contrast to that of he co-campaigners): "I want to thank Floridians. Everybody here has been so positive in every part of the state."

What Florida has done: "It is now clear that this will be a two person race between the conservative leader, Newt Gingrich and the Massachusetts moderate," says Gingrich. And to "the same people who said I was dead" in July and after Iowa, "I just want to reassure them tonight ,we will contest every place and we are going to win and we are going to Tampa as the nominee in August."

"You might ask, how can that be true?" Gingrich asked the question he knew would be raised by his remarks. Because, he said citing Abraham Lincoln's famous words, "We have government of the people by the people for the people...And people power will defeat money power."

Notably, he did not mention calling or congratulating Romney.

9:07 p.m. Why Santorum is decrying the mud: An "analysis from Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG) shows a whopping 92% of ads airing in Florida over the past week were negative".

8:59 p.m. Rick Santorum is with supporters in Las Vegas tonight, thanking them and others on both sides of the aisle for their prayers and support during the recent hospitalization of his medically vulnerable 3-year-old, Bella, who was born with a genetic condition.

"Republicans can do better...this campaign went downhill" in Florida, Santorum says, decrying the "mud-wrestling match" in the state. He pledges to continue campaigning.

8:56 p.m. Andrew Sullivan did not like Romney's speech.

This speech is most dishonest, manipulative, disgusting series of lies I've heard in a very long time: thebea.st/whho7P #mitt #FLprimary

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) February 1, 2012

8:32 pm. And here comes Mitt. "Thanks you guys!" he says. Cried of Mitt! Mitt! Mitt! fill the air. "There are fewer candidates tonight than when the race began," Romey says, graciously acknowledging his competitors. "Primary contests are not easy and they are not supposed to be," he notes, adding that those who worry about the impact of the highly negative primary contest should not fear: "A competitive primary does not divide us, it prepares us. And we will win! And when we gather back here in Tampa for our convention ours will be a united party with a winning ticket for America."

And from there, Romney dives straight into an attack on Obama.

8:30 pm. The Romney family is taking the stage at the Romney victory party in Florida. "Thank you Florida!" says a beaming Ann Romney, who goes on to thank key campaign supporters and endorsers.

8:00 p.m. CNN and NBC News are projecting that Mitt Romney will win the Florida primary.

7:45 p.m. The next GOP presidential primary debate -- and next big opportunity for someone to change the narrative of the race -- won't be until February 22. Before that happens, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum -- should they all stay in the race -- will have to weather the Nevada caucuses on Feb. 4, the Maine caucuses February 4-11, the Colorado and Minnesota caucuses on February 7, and the Missouri primary on February 7. Gingrich won't be appearing on the ballot in Missouri, having failed to meet a filing deadline in the state.

7:33 p.m. The U.S. House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report offers his take:

It's a testament to the most powerful (and perhaps the only true) GOP urban machine in the country: Diaz-Balarts + Ros-Lehtinen

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) February 1, 2012

Mitt's Cuban landslide in Miami-Dade has already sunk Newt in FL: early votes there are 68% Mitt, 19% Newt, a la McCain '08

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) February 1, 2012

7:26 p.m. This is no Iowa replay. Early returns show Romney with 50 percent of the vote. No Mr. 25 Percent, he.

Florida already looks over, but Team Romney aren't talking much yet. Superstitious lot.

— Paul Bedard(@WhispersBedard) February 1, 2012

7:21 p.m. Bachmann, Hunstman, Perry -- all gone. You know who hasn't dropped out of the running yet? Buddy Roemer. GQ's Marin Cogan caught up with the quixotic Republican candidate in Orlando.

7:17 p.m. The Romney clan is gathering for the victory party. Early returns show a strong lead for Romney.

Just arriving at the convention center in Tampa with the family. #mitt2012 twitter.com/joshromney/sta...

— Josh Romney (@joshromney) February 1, 2012

7:00 p.m. Polls in the eastern part of the state are closing now.

Miami polls close at 7:00 pm, or as condo residents there call it "bedtime."

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) January 31, 2012

Polls in the Florida Panhandle stay open until 7 p.m. Central time, or 8 Eastern (Florida encompasses two time zones). Expect new organizations to call the race shortly after that.

6:28 p.m. Politico's Ken Vogel reports that Newt Gingrich's campaign has been paying the candidate himself and his private entities:

Newt Gingrich's campaign paid him $47,000 for a list of supporters and paid one of his companies another $67,000 for web hosting, according to a report filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission.

The report paints a picture of a campaign that is working to professionalize, but continues to be based in part around the candidate himself and the network of companies and non-profits that he built after leaving Congress....

...it's unusual for a presidential candidate personally to be paid significant amounts for travel or lists -- both because candidates can contribute an unlimited amount in cash or services to their own campaigns and because campaigns typically foot travel costs directly.

6:00 p.m. The Obama-Biden campaign is repeating what it did in Iowa with the Des Moines Register on the night of the caucuses, buying the banner ad at the top of the Miami Herald website so that those seeking GOP presidential primary results also have to confront the Obama message.

5:50 p.m. The early expectations-setting buzz, via the Drudge Report:

5:46 p.m. There was a minor scuffle earlier today between Gingrich security forces and a Ron Paul supporter who was holding a big sign support Paul in such a way it was getting into Gingrich's photo op in Windermere, Fla., according to Yahoo!:

Gingrich aides and security personnel swarmed Dillard, trying to intimidate him into moving. One of Gingrich's security agents stepped in front of him. When Dillard didn't budge, the agent lifted his heeled shoe over Dillard's bare foot and dug the back of it into his skin, twisting it side-to-side like he was stomping out a cigarette. Shocked, Dillard kept his ground and took a picture of the agent with his phone, which was quickly knocked out of his hand. Dillard slipped off his flip-flop to pick up the phone with his foot, and a Gingrich supporter kicked the sandal away.

"Don't kick me!" Dillard said to the man who knocked away his sandal. More members of Gingrich's security retinue approached, shoving their shoulders and chests in front of him.

"Just block him!" a Gingrich campaign aide said. "Everyone step on his toes!"

Gingrich supporters handed a "Newt 2012" yard sign up to the front to put in front of Dillard's Paul sign. The two signs, zipping back and forth inches from Gingrich's head, circled each other in the air like fighter jets in a dogfight.

When the candidate finished taking pictures with voters, furious Gingrich aides grilled Dillard.

"If we did this to you, you guys would be furious," said an aide before stomping back toward the bus. "They have no class. No class."

As Gingrich pulled away, Dillard looked down at his foot. With the adrenaline pumping, he hadn't noticed the pain, but now it was starting to sink in. A bruise was forming, and there was a cut mark where the security agent had dug in his heel.

"That was really something," Dillard said afterwards. "My heart's racing. Not what I expected to happen today."

5:30 p.m. If it's Tuesday, that means there's an election somewhere. Today's is in Florida.

What's the chatter down South?

Hot topic at Tampa polling location among poll workers is proliferation of huge pythons in Fla. Turnout light

— Quinn Bowman (@quinnbowman) January 31, 2012

And what's Newt been talking about today?

Newt in Celebration, FL: "I really wanted to go to the Magic Kingdom and Epcot. Epcot's my favorite place." #Campaign2012

— Sarah Huisenga (@SarahH_CBSNJ) January 31, 2012

How's Romney thinking about things? He told ABC:

"With a turnout like this, I'm beginning to feel we might win tomorrow," the former Massachusetts governor, who kept his schedule light today, said at a campaign stop on Monday.

Polls show Romney with a solid lead in the state.

Also worth noting: it has been a very nasty race down there. Nastier than usual. The vast majority of the ads have been negative, and then today someone either from or purporting to be from the Gingrich campaign started robocalling in Florida to warn that Mitt Romney would take kosher meals away from Holocaust survivors. Classy.

We blogged the last-minute salvos as the Granite State headed to the polls and the results came in.

10:38 p.m. A couple of quick thoughts on the race:

1) Times have changed enough that it now is possible to be too anti-gay for even a GOP presidential primary contest. The young let-us-alone brigades who backed Paul also blocked Santorum's ascent in New Hampshire.

2) It was a very good night for Mormons running for president, with Romney and Huntsman taking first and third in the state, and later making remarks alongside large, good-looking and prosperous families, who will help any barriers left for Mormons in public life fall.

3) New Hampshire pollsters did a commendable job in a notoriously hard to poll state; there were no major surprises, for a change.

4) For all the early chatter about the GOP's field of far-right candidates, the race in the end took some surprisingly liberal turns, with voters handing the victory in both Iowa and N.H. to a Massachusetts moderate (or former moderate, at any rate) whose career has now sparked a debate within the GOP about the moral worthiness of financial sector work.

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, I bid you good night.

10:01 p.m. Everyone's staying in, it seems. In speeches following Romney's tonight, Ron Paul (No. 2 finisher), Jon Hunstman (No. 3) and Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum (still trading votes between 4th and 5th) all indicated they would stay in the race and continue to fight in South Carolina, which holds its primary January 21. Paul gave a long series of remarks to a wildly enthusiastic audience that broke out into chant of "revolution!", discoursing widely on liberty, the Federal Reserve, monetary policy, inflation, and intellectual diversity. Huntsman, for his part, was oddly ebullient, declaring: "Ladies and gentlemen I think we're in the hunt...third place is a ticket to ride." Santorum was downcast, but pointed out that he'd doubled or tripled his poll numbers in the state since winning the Iowa caucuses. And Gingrich was unapologetic for his attacks on Romney, which have opened a rift within the Republican party over how to talk about unfettered free-market capitalism and the financial sector. All vowed to press on.

8:40 p.m. Mitt to N.H.: "You're the best!" A beaming Mitt Romney just finished addressing his supporters in New Hampshire, clearly savoring the win as they chanted "Mitt Mitt Mitt" and hooted their joy, but wasting no time in resuming his relentless critique of President Obama in words honed on the stump across multiple states.

"Tonight we celebrate, tomorrow we go back to work," Romney said. But his speech saw him eager to go back to work immediately as he quickly shifted into a general election attack. "Today we're faced with the disappointing record of a failed president," he said, pointing to Obama's comment on the economy that "it could be worse." "It could be worse?! That's not what it means to be an American, it could be worse," Romney said. "What defines us as Americans is our unwavering conviction that it must be better and it will be better....Americans know that our future is brighter and better than these troubled times....We still believe in the hope the promise and the dream of America."

"The president has run out of ideas, now he's running out of excuses," Romney said, as the crowd again burst out with cries of Mitt Mitt Mitt Mitt. A smile crept across his face. "Tonight were asking the good people of South Carolina to join the people of New Hampshire and make 2012 the year he runs out of time."

Romney nodded toward the critiques of his tenure at Bain Capital coming from other Republicans, but turned even that into a critique of the president. "President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial and in the last few days we've seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him," Romney said. This was "such a mistake for our party." He urged Americans to be "lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by our envy of success" and to celebrate the core values that unite the nation.

He closed by thanking New Hampshire for the victory that eluded him four years ago -- "You're the best!" -- and turned away from the cameras to his assembled family.

8:22 p.m. A solid second for Paul. CNN is now projecting that Ron Paul will come in second in N.H. and Jon Huntsman will come in third.

8:18 p.m. Huntsman staying in. Now in third place behind Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in the New Hampshire voting, Jon Huntsman tells CNN he will not be dropping out of the race: "There are at least three tickets out of New Hampshire." His campaign will go on to South Carolina and is in "a solid, comfortable, confident position," he said.

8:02 p.m. Going negative on Newt. The Wall Street Journal helps unpack why Gingrich is in such need of outside group aid in seeking to fend off the Romney-leaning SuperPAC ads: "96% of Negative Super PAC Spending Since Iowa Has Targeted Gingrich."

8:00 pm. Romney wins. CNN has waited until the polls are all closed to make the call and is now predicting that Mitt Romney is the winner of the New Hampshire primary.

7:46 p.m. County-by-county results. Google is mapping the votes as they come in.

7:27 p.m. The very early results. With 1 percent of the vote in, it's Romney-Paul-Huntsman, according to CNN.

6:54 p.m. Does Romney really like to fire people? New York magazine's Dan Amira has a fun blog item up looking at "Who Has Mitt Romney Fired, and How Much Did He Like Doing It?" complete with a handy needle graphic.

6:41 p.m. Exit poll hints. Early exit polls are coming in, and show a surprisingly high percentage of independent voters -- 44 percent -- in the contest, with Mitt Romney "narrowly leading among that vital voting bloc," according to Fox News. Also, that voters in N.H. have more money than voters did in Iowa.

6:29 p.m. More about that anti-Romney video. Former Atlantic senior editor Joshua Green took a gander at "When Mitt Romney Came to Town," the film purchased by the Gingrich-leaning Super PAC Winning Our Future for airing, in some form, in South Carolina. His observations: "The film focuses on four companies acquired by Bain that later suffered difficulties or filed for bankruptcy -- UniMac Corp., KB Toys, America Pad & Paper or Ampad, and DDI Corp. (DDIC), an electronics company....[an interview with a] purportedly fired worker is juxtaposed with a clip of Romney saying, 'For an economy to thrive, there are a lot of people who will suffer as a result of that.'....A woman is shown claiming that Romney has '15 homes,' although recent public reports indicate that Romney currently has three homes. Twice in the film, Romney is also shown speaking in French. The two-time presidential aspirant was a Mormon missionary in France as a young man."

4:33 p.m. Bill Kristol is skeptical of Bain's defenders. "If this is where some in the conservative movement and the Republican party are inclined to go--four cheers for finance capitalism!--good luck. Indeed, it's useful to flush out this tendency now, and subject it to debate. Because it's a recipe for political disaster--and intellectual sterility," he writes in The Weekly Standard.

"Post 2008, capitalism needs its strong defenders--but its defenders need also to be its constructive critics. The Tea Party was right. What's needed is a critique of Big Government above all, but also of Big Business and Big Finance and Big Labor (and Big Education and Big Media and all the rest)--and especially a critique of all those occasions when one or more of these institutions conspire against the common good."

3:45 p.m. GOP not well positioned on decrying capitalism. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich raises a note of skepticism in Salon when it comes to the Romney critics: "I'm all in favor of reforming capitalism, but you'll permit me some skepticism when it comes to criticisms of Bain Capital coming from Romney's Republican opponents. None of these Republican candidates has exactly distinguished himself with new ideas for giving Americans more economic security. To the contrary -- until the assault on Romney and Bain Capital -- every one of them has been a cheerleader for financial capitalism of the most brutal sort."

3:40 p.m. That pro-Romney PAC has spent at least $7 million so far. Reports NBC: "Restore Our Future, the Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney's presidential bid, has placed a new $1.7 ad buy in Florida, bringing its total spending to $7 million and counting, according to Smart Media Group Delta, the ad-tracking firm partnering with NBC News. By comparison, the well-financed Romney campaign so far has spent just $5.5 million in advertising." Little wonder Newt Gingrich is so mad.

3:35 p.m. Ron Paul's campaign defends Mitt Romney. Paul campaign national chairman Jesse Benton decries the pile-on over Romney's firing people comment. "Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman, and Newt Gingrich are once again proving why they are unfit to be President and why this has become a two man national race between Mitt Romney, the candidate of the status quo, and Ron Paul, the candidate of real change," Benton said in a statement.

"Two important issues that should unite Republicans are a belief in free markets and an understanding that the media often use 'gotcha' tactics to discredit us. Rather than run against Governor Romney on the issues of the day Santorum, Huntsman, and Gingrich have chosen to play along with the media elites and exploit a quote taken horribly out of context. They are also using the language of the liberal left to attack private equity and condemn capitalism in a desperate and, frankly, unsavory attempt to tear down another Republican with tactics akin to those of MoveOn.org."

For more on how the attacks on Romney's business background and that quote are being greeted by free-market conservatives, see David A. Graham's story today, "How Gingrich's Attack on Romney and Bain Backfired, Part II."

2:22 p.m. Ouch. Santorum, reflecting on how his upbringing is different than Romney's: "the nuns beat my knuckles bare."

1:58 p.m. No, you're fired. The DNC has released a Web video response to Romney's comment on liking to fire people: 2

1:41p.m. A One State Wonder. The Hill reports: "Jon Huntsman might be the trendy pick to surge in the New Hampshire primary, but a Public Policy Polling survey released on Tuesday shows it will be a challenge for him to carry that momentum into South Carolina, where he's currently polling behind comedian Stephen Colbert." Many people raise questions about PPP's polls. But still.

11:52 a.m. Oh, that former Massachusetts governor. Buzzfeed has surfaced "The Five Most Pro-Gay Romney Documents."

11:49 a.m. Ready, Aim, Fire. Mitt Romney's gaffe about liking to fire people continued to resonate Tuesday, TPM reports: "At an event in New Hampshire Tuesday, as Romney held a baby, someone in the audience yelled, 'Are you going to fire the baby?'"

11:01 a.m. Gingrich has a private equity past. CNN reports: "Upon leaving Congress in 1999, the former Speaker joined private equity firm Forstmann Little & Co. as a member of its advisory board. It is unclear how long Gingrich served on the advisory board, or how much he was paid. The campaign has not yet responded to a request for comment. Forstmann Little was one of the world's original leveraged buyout firms, although its founder -- the late Teddy Forsmann -- often railed against what he saw as over-leveraging by rival firms (presumably including Bain). It effectively began winding down operations in 2005, following a legal dispute with the State of Connecticut over failed investments in a pair of large communications companies." The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby says it was also a competitor to Bain Capital.

11:00 a.m. A pro-Rommney backlash? New Hampshirites don't like being told what to think -- just ask Hillary Clinton. Tweets a Romney strategist:

NH poised to deliver verdict on Bain attacks against Romney as last Suffolk poll shows Romney ticking up 4 points overnight.

— Eric Fehrnstrom (@EricFehrn) January 10, 2012

10:50 a.m. Hello, New Hampshire. Here's your Atlantic morning reading:

Molly Ball lays out "The Granite State Stakes."

Brian Goldsmith says "It's Not Too Late to Go Negative on Mitt Romney."

James Fallows "On the Psychology of 'Liking' to Fire People."

For complete coverage, check out our Election 2012 page.

This just in from the Ron Paul campaign's national chairman, Jesse Benton:

"Dr. Paul has been committed to meeting one on one with New Hampshire voters, and has aggressively campaigned at town halls, house parties, and meet and greets since early last spring.

"This morning, he attempted to hold an event at Moe Joe's Diner in Manchester, to speak with patrons and supporters in the last push before the New Hampshire primary. Unfortunately, Dr. Paul and his family were forced to leave early after over 120 members of the press created a mob-like atmosphere that was deemed to be unsafe for the candidate, Moe Joe's customers, and reporters themselves.

"The campaign had planned to cover our normal degree of media interest, which is always ample. However, a significant increase in the press corps, largely driven by an influx of foreign journalists, exceeded all expectations.

"Mrs. Paul herself, attempting to campaign alongside her husband, was shoved aside by one reporter and told to "get out of the way."

"While we are very welcoming of media coverage and grateful for the interest in Dr. Paul and his campaign, basic safety simply must come first. On behalf of Dr. Paul and his campaign team, I would like to apologize to customers at Moe Joe's who may have been distressed by this incident, and extend our gratitude and apologies to the owners, who were kind enough to have us.

"We ask the press, at all upcoming events over the next day and a half, to be respectful of both Dr. Paul and of New Hampshire voters, who are entitled to examine their candidates in a safe and responsible atmosphere."

You can read more about the incident today in Manchester, N.H., here: "Media mob chases Ron Paul from campaign stop in New Hampshire."

The Republican presidential front-runner channels Donald Trump when discussing how to handle an annoying insurance company.

"I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don't like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If, if, you know if someone doesn't give me a good service that I need, I want to say I'm going to go get someone else to provide that service to me."
--Mitt Romney, Nashua, N.H.

Her presidential bid began to lose altitude the day she won the Ames straw poll, but it took a sixth-place Iowa finish to push her out of the contest.

WEST DES MOINES -- After coming in sixth in the Iowa caucuses, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann suspended her campaign for the presidency Wednesday morning in a hotel ballroom in Iowa. A round of hugs with teary supporters, with the strains of campaign theme song "Hey, Soul Sister" in the background, followed her remarks, which the House Tea Party Caucus founder used as an opportunity to once again state her firm opposition to President Obama's "socialism."

Vowing to continue her fight against "Obamacare," which she said had been the impetus for her presidential bid, Bachmann stood beneath a crystal chandelier in the West Des Moines Marriott and warned that the president's health-care overhaul legislation "has now become the playground of left-wing social engineering" and "will represent a turning point in our country" if not repealed in 2012.

"What the Congress had done and what President Obama had done in passing 'Obamacare' endangered the very survival of the United States of America," she said. "I will continue fighting to defeat the president's agenda of socialism."

The winner of the Iowa Republican Party's straw poll in August -- and also the poll's first female winner -- Bachmann's meteoric rise over the summer ended the day of her Ames victory, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry got into the race, quickly stealing national attention and making her long-shot candidacy seem even more improbable. She proved a deft Perry critic in debates, pressing him again and again on his support in Texas for mandating that girls be vaccinated against HPV. But she was never able to recover the momentum she had in July, and her campaign continued to falter as one rival after another caught the fancy of a fickle Republican primary electorate that never went back to her.

"Last night the people of Iowa spoke with a very clear voice and so I have decided to stand aside," Bachmann said. The decision came this morning, Bachmann spokeswoman Alice Stewart said, though Bachmann called her competitors last night to congratulate them.

Saying that she had "no regrets -- none whatsoever," Bachmann affirmed her faith in God and thanked her husband of 33 years, Marcus Bachmann, her children (by name), her campaign staffers, and key Iowa supporters.

She did not offer any endorsement of the remaining presidential contenders, but said, "We must rally around the person our people and our party choose to be standard bearer."

Perry, who had also been expected to withdraw from the race after announcing last night he would not immediately go on to New Hampshire as planned, now appears to be staying in the contest. "And the next leg of the marathon is the Palmetto State.... Here we come South Carolina!!!" he tweeted Wednesday morning. The South Carolina primary takes place on January 21.

Image credit: Associated Press

Johnson is "absolutely" staying in the race and continuing with his third-party bid, despite reports to the contrary spurred by a "concocted" email.

News reports this evening had libertarian former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson dropping his bid to win the Libertarian Party nod and endorsing Ron Paul, suggesting a Paul third party bid might be in the offing after Paul's strong showing in the Iowa caucuses tonight.

A spokesman for Gary Johnson said those reports were false.

"Somebody is sending an email to news outlets concocted from me and that is absolutely not true," Joe Hunter, communications director for Gary Johnson, told The Atlantic. "I have not even seen the email. I hope to soon."

But the take home was that Johnson was "absolutely" staying in the race and continuing with his third-party bid.

Image: Mark Wilson / Getty Images

MARION, Iowa -- Now that Buzzfeed.com is on the bus, how are some journos riding around on the Mitt Romney for President media bus spending drive-time between events (when not writing, of course)? In a world where even Words with Friends has lost its charm, there's always Quickmeme.com:

The extreme volatility in the 2012 race in the lead-off state appears to have been related to the low level of direct voter contact here before the last minute.

ATLANTIC, Iowa -- The media scrum inside the Family Table Restaurant was a thing to behold. Judy Woodruff. Al Hunt. Mike Allen. Jessica Yellin. Dan Balz.

Romney stood at counter-level and delivered an abbreviated version of his stump speech to the smattering of Iowans visible drinking sodas and sitting at tables, before plunging into the ocean of press and quickly being swallowed by a ring of videocameras as he made his way to the next room.

His wife, Ann Romney, wearing a red suit jacket and gray pearls, pressed herself up against a wall, out of the path of reporters who stampeded after the candidate in hopes of a fresh remark.

"I don't think you can get used to it," Ann Romney said of the scrum, as she looked out across where her husband had disappeared. "It's a bit of a crush."

With the former Massachusetts governor finally topping the polls in Iowa and in the lead in Saturday's Des Moines Register Iowa Poll, considered the most definitive of all the polls in advance of the Tuesday caucuses, the media turned out to see the front-runner. But the crush hasn't just been like this for Romney, and wasn't all post-Register poll. In Ames Friday, Santorum was mobbed by reporters at an appearance at Buffalo Wild Wings to watch the Iowa State Cyclones play in the Pinstripe Bowl. Meanwhile, the politically apathetic young men and women getting drunk and watching the game before he arrived had no idea who he was -- "We're here for the game, I can't even lie," said Sarah Smith, 31, of Des Moines. "I don't know anything about him" -- their presence little more than an Iowa backdrop for a photo-op of the former Pennsylvania senator eating wings and talking to reporters and his own kids. Newt Gingrich's tears at a Friday morning event at Java Joe's in downtown Des Moines were broadcast on C-SPAN; reporters not packing into the audience of Iowa moms hosting the chat waited patiently for the doors to reopen post-event-taping to catch him during a book signing. Ron Paul held a large Monday rally at the downtown Marriott in Des Moines, where several hundred members of the press are staying, and where the bar at night comes alive with reporters chasing their deadlines with something to deaden the edge on their fatigue.

There's reaching voters, and then there's the theater of campaigning for the cameras when everyone is watching, spinning the message forward into the ether until it slips through one of the many electronic windows voters hold open to the world.

"He does love getting out and shaking hands," Craig Romney, the candidate's youngest son, said while standing in the kitchen of the Family Table looking at the ring of boom mics and cameras that marked the spot where his father presumably was. "Reporters make it a little more difficult to do that."

At a press availability afterwards, more than 72 reporters and 10 video cameras crammed into a single room. Down in front! Arose the cry from the cameramen and women. "I'm not getting on my knees for a Republican," grumbled one journo before complying. Dozens of reporters crouched and kneeled and perched on chairs in their bulky winter jackets, diligently recording Romney's extremely mild critique of surging former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.

There's no getting around the fact that ratio of members of the press to potential voters at candidate appearances this cycle has been out of balance. The crowds have been smaller than in past cycles, for a variety of reasons: this is the second caucus in a row to take place right after a New Year's holiday, the deadest of dead times of the year; the overall less than compelling field has not compelled people to events; and, most critically, the breakdown in the culture of competitive Iowa campaigning means candidates have been hastily throwing together events of a size and complexity that in previous cycles would have been typical of summer and early fall visits. "There's a lot of coffeeshop talk but when it comes to meeting candidates, not so much," said State Senator Joni Ernst, a Romney backer in Atlantic. There are fewer yard signs, too.

In Davenport, Iowa, more than 100 (mainly middle-aged men in short coats) gathered on a brisk holiday morning Monday the day before the caucuses for a return appearance in the town where Romney had held his largest recent gathering at a boutique hotel less than a week ago. "This was not on the schedule five days ago," said the man who'd introduced Romney the other time, Steve Garrison of Burlington, 40. Beyond Romney, for whom he will caucus, the only other candidate Garrison had seen was Santorum. Potential caucus-goers have historically been able to rely on a first-hand assessment of the candidates, but that's not been the case this year. "Iowans, quite frankly, have gotten spoiled in the last couple of decades," he acknowledged.

A lot of candidate visits just didn't happen this year. The cycle got a late start and was heavily debate-driven. Some candidates stayed away from Iowa until the last minute, or else never had a strong campaign in any state. What this has meant on the ground is that a lot of potential voters who in previous cycles might have already met the candidates several times or at least once each were into the final weekend of pre-caucuses campaigning and just finally getting a chance to meet one of them for the first time. "I am one of the 41 percent that still hasn't decided," said Sheryl Schultz, 60, of Macedonia, Ia., in Atlantic, where she was going to see Romney for the first time less than three full days before needing to make a call. Asked if she'd seen him before, she said no: "I haven't seen him but I do watch....I watch a lot of news." Same with Santorum: "I just watched him on TV and I looked at him online."

Formally undecided Republicans like her were using the last-minute appearances to either ratify their leanings or upend them, should the man in the room not seem to be the same one they'd seen on television. Several one-time Perry supporters told me they'd been with him until they saw him in person, when he seemed weak or uncertain, reading written remarks instead of speaking, like Santorum, from the heart. Others unsure as to the choice between Romney and Santorum were swayed to Santorum's side after seeing him speak, based as much on the impression that he was a forthright and sincere man as his anti-abortion politics. They knew Romney from the debates, but the emotional resonance just wasn't the same as being in a room with Santorum. (That is, when it was possible to see him in a room -- to get away from the crush of reporters required being at least an hour-and-a-half from Des Moines.) And yet others were leaning Romney and just wanted to be sure they weren't making the wrong choice; to do that they needed to see him themselves at least once, as hundreds gathered to do in Council Bluffs Sunday night at the Bayliss Park Hall mansion.

For their patience, they were treated not to an Iowa-specific appeal, but to a candidate who seemed already to be pivoting to the general election, confident that challenges from those closest to him in the state's polls, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, would amount to little in the months ahead. "Democrats love America too. Independents love America," Romney affirmed. He went after Obama as someone who believes in an "entitlement society" instead of an "opportunity society"; someone who would turn the U.S. into Europe if he could; a failed president and one whose time in office represented a "detour" and not a "destiny." Romney also compared Obama to a reality TV star, much the same way John McCain once compared Obama to Paris Hilton: "You know, I've been looking at some video clips on YouTube, of President Obama, then candidate Obama, going through Iowa making promises. The gap between his promises and his performance is the largest I've seen since, well, the Kardashian wedding and the promise of 'till death do us part.'"

The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, had dug in in Des Moines to dog Romney, sending laid-off former American Pad and Paper (AMPAD) plant worker Randy Johnson to Iowa to blame Romney and Bain Capital, which bought AMPAD in 1992, for Johnson's job loss in Indiana. On Monday, Romney campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom pointed to the Democrats' focus as a sign that they and Obama were "terrified" of running against Romney, the implicit message being that he would be the most electable Republican.

Even the larger events have this year failed to reach the same scale as in the last two caucus cycles. In 2008, Mike Huckabee brought in Chuck Norris and held a 2,500-person caucus-eve party at the Val Air Ballroom in Valley Junction. This cycle, there have been no last-minute celebrities rewarding hordes of campaign volunteers with an entertaining evening. Reality stars the Duggars made an appearance at a Santorum event the day before the caucuses, but they were barely advertised in advance, and an announcement of their endorsement with less than 48 hours to go was the very definition of late in the game. "I think the entire year is different and just very unusual," observed Eric Woolsen, Iowa campaign manager for Michele Bachmann, during an interview Saturday at her headquarters. In 2008, he played the same role for caucuses-winner Huckabee. "It's been a very volatile cycle," he said.

"I don't think this cycle any coalition has really coalesced around anybody," he said. There's been nothing like the unified home-school coalition that helped Huckabee to the win. Steve Deace, the conservative Iowa radio host who also backed Huckabee, this time has chosen Newt Gingrich, while the Family Leader's Bob Vander Plaats has endorsed Santorum.

The combination of the proliferation of media and the diminishment of the ground campaign means that the campaign has been much more mediated for Iowa voters than in past cycles. And that's led to some resentments, as voters used to being agenda-setters for the nation have been reduced to watching cable-TV debates like everyone else in America, and seeing those debates have a powerful impact on the fortunes of candidates whom they have not had a chance to meet, or -- worse -- whom they favor. "It's hard when certain candidates get all the attention," said undecided voter Miguel Chavez, 43, of Rhinebeck, Ia., after a town hall with Santorum in Marshalltown. Complained Lenny Scaletta, the Pottawatomie County chair for Bachmann and founder of the Council Bluffs Tea Party, while volunteering Saturday at the congresswoman's office: "The news media is picking these presidents."

For a time people thought that the ability of candidates like Herman Cain to rise based on the strength of broadcast and webcast answers to questions posed by members of the press in televised debates meant everything would be different this cycle, that the laws of campaigning had been changed. But those polling boomlets turned out to be as ephemeral as tech bubbles; the laws of political gravity were not actually repealed.

"If you look at the end here, the three candidates who seem to be positioned to do well -- Paul, Romney and Santorum -- what all three have in common is they've spent a lot of time in Iowa," observed Brian Kennedy, Romney's Iowa Chairman, at a Monday rally in Dubuque. "I mean Mitt Romney and Ron Paul ran four years ago and have continued to come to the state. Rick Santorum has made Iowa his one and only priority. And that's paid off for them. I think it once again reaffirms you can't do Iowa from long distance."

While Santorum did the most campaigning in the state in 2011, Paul and Romney both spent a great deal of time there last cycle. As the Quad-City Times noted in endorsing him, "Even with his limited 2011 caucus campaigning, Romney's 2007 through 2011 Iowa visits top every candidate in the current field."

Or as Santorum himself put it in Marshalltown: "You can't buy Iowa. You've got to earn it."

Image credit: Garance Franke-Ruta

As the 2012 presidential contest heat up, we thought we'd take a look back through The Atlantic archives at some of our historic political coverage. From these stories emerge a portrait of the American character as it has struggled with troublesome dynamics that continue to shape our politics. Here's Oliver T. Morton in an 1884 issue of the magazine, quoting utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill on what's wrong with the presidential nominating process, then conducted at national conventions:

"In the United States, at the election of President, the strongest party never dares put forward any of its strongest men, because every one of these, from the mere fact that he has been long in the public eye, has made himself objectionable to some portion or other of the party, and is therefore not so sure a card for rallying all their votes as a person who has never been heard of by the public at all until he is produced as the candidate. Thus, the man who is chosen, even by the strongest party, represents, perhaps, the real wishes only of the narrow margin by which that party outnumbers the other. Any section whose support is necessary to success possesses a veto on the candidate. Any section which holds out more obstinately than the rest can compel all the others to adopt its nominee; and this superior pertinacity is, unhappily, more likely to be found among those who are holding out for their own interest than for that of the public. The choice of the majority is therefore very likely to be determined by that portion of the body who are the most timid, the most narrow-minded and prejudiced, or who cling most tenaciously to the exclusive class interest; in which case the electoral rights of the minority, while useless for the purposes for which votes are given, serve only for compelling the majority to accept the candidate of the weakest or worst portion of themselves."

While the means by which American presidential nominees are chosen is far more democratic than in Mill's day, the power of obstinate minorities of superior pertinacity would seem to persist.