TURNAROUND! - THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY RESULTS - January 10, 2008

Some surprises are half-expected: outcomes that people know are plausible, but regard as unlikely. Other surprises are truly surprising – outcomes scarcely considered at all, because they did not even seem plausible. Barack Obama scored the first kind of surprise last week in Iowa, when young voters, "the college kids" so often promised and rarely delivered, turned out in droves for him. Hillary Clinton scored the second kind of surprise in New Hampshire, winning a race that polling and commentators anticipated as an Obama landslide.

What happened? We know that women voters in New Hampshire moved substantially toward Hillary in the last days and hours before the election. The US political media, often weirdly self-referential, are already framing this late shift as backlash against their own coverage of the race, and especially "the cry" – a momentary show of emotion, replayed endlessly on cable news shows, that now takes its place in political-media lore alongside Howard Deam's (equally semimythical) "scream" after losing the Iowa caucuses in 2004 (R.R.: It has an earlier antecedent. In 1972, Democratic nomination candidate Edward Muskie saw his prospects doomed by news coverage after he possibly teared up in response to a local newspaper's attacks on his wife. George McGovern won the nomination and went on to be defeated by Nixon in a landslide). Other factors may have played an equal or greater part. Hillary had an excellent ground operation to bring out her vote, and aimed her message on issues such as health care services especially at middle- and working-class women.

         
The New Hampshire surprise, however, is not so much how Hillary won as that she won at all, when most polls even a day before the voting showed Obama with a wide lead. Why were the polls wrong? [1] It may turn out that they were not wrong at all – simply behind the trends. Daily tracking polls showed enormous day-by-day swings during the few days between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. The tide came in for Obama overnight, and it went back out overnight (R.R.: One pollster, John Zogby, reports that his polling actually picked up the shift toward Hillary starting late Sunday and Monday, but felt constrained from reporting it because he was releasing three-day averages [2]).

         
The nationwide primary race, already transformed once by the Iowa results, will probably be transformed again. As of yesterday, the surge of excitement about Obama that followed the Iowa results had brought his national support to within one point of Hillary's in a national tracking poll, effectively a tied race. [3] Obama's now-deflated momentum might subside, returning the overall national race to its condition before the Iowa caucuses. At that time, Hillary's wide national lead reflected a reservoir of strength in the downstream states, especially the large states from New York to California that vote on Super Tuesday, 5 February.
More likely, however, the Democratic race will now prove competitive nationwide. In advance of Super Tuesday on 5 February, Obama has good prospects in the benchmark South Carolina primary, where the Democratic electorate includes a large African-American community, and in the Nevada caucuses, where he got an endorsement from the influential restaurant workers' union. Voters in the large states, accustomed to races where the frontrunner already had overwhelming margins before they got to vote, are likely to be energized by a competitive race, leading to further record turnouts on the Democratic side – and making pollsters' task more difficult.

                     
For John Edwards the prospects are bleak but not hopeless – not in a primary season that has already delivered back to back shockers. After placing narrowly ahead of Hillary in Iowa, he ran a distant third in New Hampshire, and is not clearly competitive in any upcoming states. Nevertheless there is always the chance that Edwards might emerge as a third choice if Hillary and Obama fight each other to a standstill.
On the Republican side New Hampshire delivered a relatively unsurprising surprise, John McCain's win over Mitt Romney. Romney, former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, had built up a large early lead in New Hampshire at a time when the McCain campaign seemed moribund. Late last year, however, McCain began tapping into his well of support from the 2000 primary, when he stung George Bush in New Hampshire. He rose in the polls past a sagging Romney, only to apparently stall in the final days. [4]

      
In New Hampshire, "independents," voters not affiliated with a party, can vote in either party's primary, and long have done so. Independents were key to McCain's victory in 2000, and during the weekend before the voting there was much media speculation that they might flock to the Democratic race to vote for Obama in such large numbers as to rob McCain of his support base. Close analysis of exit polling data may reveal that Obama's shortfall was McCain's saving, or that the two parties' races are less interlinked there than in the past.

         
Mitt Romney, who based his campaign strategy on scoring early wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, is in serious trouble after losing both. However, he is able to fund his race from his own pocket. In the musical-chairs Republican race, where many voters like none of the candidates, it may be risky to count anyone out, even onetime frontrunner Rudy Guiliani. For now the frontrunners are Huckabee – who did poorly in New Hampshire, which has few evangelicals – and McCain, who did poorly in Iowa.

         
For both parties the nomination race now enters unknown territory. A few more single-state primaries during January continue the steeplechase tradition of primary seasons past, but the quasi-national Super Tuesday primaries on 5 February, when some 20 states hold primaries or caucuses, is unprecedented. No candidate in either party seems likely to develop unstoppable momentum in advance of such a large single contest, as might have been the case had a single candidate won both opening rounds. In both parties, the first two contests have only made the races more complex, unpredictable, and interesting.
      

Rick Robinson

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Author of the article holds B.A. degree in Economics from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and M.A. degree in English from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California . Mr. Robinson worked as a county-level campaigner in Dukakis (1988) and Clinton (1992) presidential campaigns. He presently works as a journalist and political commentator.

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