WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Michele Bachmann’s push to win the Iowa caucus ended right where the polls indicated it would — in sixth place of six competing candidates. She received just 5 percent of the vote.

At the top, the caucus appears to be headed for a dead heat finish between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, the last candidate to gain favor from conservatives seeking an ideological alternative to the more moderate Romney. Bachmann was the first candidate to receive that boost, when she won the Iowa straw poll in August. But that same day, Texas Gov. Rick Perry swooped into the race, took up the conservative mantle and immediately began draining support from Bachmann. Perry finished in fifth place Tuesday.

Bachmann predicted a “miracle” finish on Monday, but it never came. Regardless, she was defiant in a speech to her supporters in West Des Moines on Tuesday night, indicating she’ll continue her presidential bid and even ratcheting up the rhetoric on President Barack Obama.

“[Obama’s] liberal reign will end and the American people and our economy will finally be free,” she said. “What we need is a fearless conservative … I believe that I am that true conservative that can and will defeat Barack Obama in 2012.”

Bachmann won none of Iowa’s 99 counties. In Black Hawk County, where Bachmann was born, launched her presidential campaign in June and addressed caucus-goers minutes before they got underway, she came in fourth, with 253 votes. It was the only county in which Bachmann cracked triple digits.

Bachmann’s loss is especially hard to stomach given her Iowa background and the way she barnstormed the state in the months before the caucus. Her polling figures toiled in the low teens or single digits for months even as she crisscrossed the state, visiting all of its counties in a 10-day tour in late December.

One of Bachmann’s biggest talking points on the campaign trail centered on her straw poll win, the first ever for a woman. In the end, she had a different, more dubious distinction: the first candidate ever to win the straw poll and finish last when the votes mattered.

Brad Zaun, an Iowa state senator who has chaired Bachmann’s campaign, blamed the poor showing on the unpredictable way momentum shifted between the candidates. Bachmann’s message and organization were good, but she didn’t get a boost at the right time he said.

“Everybody was up, down, up, down, up, down,” he said. “If we’d of went another week would the outcome have been different? Yeah, probably.”

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry