The Republican candidates for president have gathered at Saint Anselm’s College for the first of two back-to-back debates that could serve as a televised confrontation of Mitt Romney, who has a large lead in the polls here.
Stay tuned here for live updates, tweets and analysis of the best moments in real time.
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The Iowa caucuses are an electoral event in which residents of the U.S. state of Iowa meet in precinct caucuses in all of Iowa's 1,774 precincts and elect delegates to the corresponding county conventions. There are 99 counties in Iowa and thus 99 conventions.
These county conventions then select delegates for both Iowa's Congressional District Convention and the State Convention, which eventually choose the delegates for the presidential nominating conventions (The Iowa caucuses are noteworthy for the amount of media attention they receive during U.S. presidential election years.
Since 1972, the Iowa caucuses have been the first major electoral event of the nominating process for President of the United States. Although only about 1% of the nation's delegates are chosen by the Iowa State Convention (25 Republican delegates in 2012, assigned proportionately), the Iowa caucuses have served as an early indication of which candidates for president might win the nomination of their political party at that party's national convention, and which ones could drop out for lack of support.
