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Breaking News Alert (Amsterdam, NY) —
While national, regional and even local Iowa media printed prominent headlines announcing Mitt Romney the winner of the Iowa Caucuses, the local media market in Amsterdam, NY found itself facing an unprecedented conundrum. Numerous media figures were contacted for this story but no one would go on record to explain their process for selecting a winner of the Iowa Caucus or the methodology involved citing confidentiality and trade secrets.
“We simply can’t make sense of the numbers as no matter how we analyze the results, no candidate exceeds 50% of the vote. Indeed, if we look at the percentage of people voting against Romney, that is nearly 75% so we would argue that Romney in no way can be deemed the winner. We absolutely cannot declare a winner at this point but it is more than clear that Romney has no mandate to proceed with the upcoming primaries.”
The sentiment was also aired on the local airwaves: “I don’t care what the numbers say; I know Romney did not win, he didn’t even get 50% of the vote. Man, did you see Sarah Palin on Fox? She’s hot! I think she actually won along with Rick Perry.”
Meanwhile, a concerned group of community leaders resolved to work together on making sense of the numbers: “THis job is too big and too complex for any one of us to figure out so we’re looking to work with local leaders to help share the cost of an Excel spreadsheet. We expect that we’ll have results right in time for the November Presidential Election”.
When confronted by the myriads of statistics, polls and subsequent primaries –likely to be quite close– in the coming weeks and months of the campaign, a representative candidly but off-the-record admitted that “Wow, that’s a lot of numbers, facts and figures. I’m not sure how we can possibly make sense of that; we’ll probably create a task force with the city, town and county so none of us gets too overwhelmed. I’m not sure we’ll make it for 2012 but we’ll have our winner picked in time for the 2016.”
When pressed on why results would be relevant well after the 2012 campaign decided the Presidential nominee, the consensus view is that “We know the local media market; don’t you dare question us. Blogger“
