Iowa, Iowa Caucuses | featured news

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump withdrew Tuesday as the moderator of a debate planned for later this month in Iowa, citing his interest in possibly still running for president as an independent. Trump pulled out of a debate he had planned to host along with the conservative magazine Newsmax, scheduled for Dec. 27, just days before the Iowa caucuses. All the GOP presidential candidates save for Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum said they would not participate.

Mitt Romney may have some help in Iowa: Ron Paul. The Texas congressman's allies and others say that he drains support from the rising Newt Gingrich, and, if that turns out to be the case during the Jan. 3 caucuses and Paul manages to triumph here, the theory is that Romney would benefit in the long-run.

A "super PAC" associated with Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign launched a $3.1 million ad buy in Iowa on Thursday, starting with an ad attacking President Obama's job-creation record and touting Romney's.

The polls of the two earliest states in the presidential nominating contest both show significant progress for Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, who has moved up about 20 points in each state since October.