New Hampshire voters blew conventional political wisdom — old and new — to smithereens Tuesday.
Hillary Clinton, the pre-Iowa frontrunner predicted by pollsters to lose badly to Barack Obama in New Hampshire, surprised the Democratic field with a victory. Her much stronger than expected finish guaranteed the Democratic race is still a lively two-person contest, not a coronation.
Results were even more dramatic on the Republican side. Mitt Romney, the pre-Iowa GOP frontrunner who was upset in the Hawkeye state by Mike Huckabee, reportedly had been closing the gap with Arizona Sen. John McCain. But McCain resurrected his bid, which many pundits had long buried, by blowing past Romney.
Huckabee tallied a respectable third, ahead of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who campaigned heavily in New Hampshire but garnered only a small percent of the vote.
Fred Thompson, once touted — albeit mostly by himself — as the heir to Ronald Reagan, finished a miserable sixth with a mere 1 percent of the vote, well behind even libertarian Ron Paul.
If Thompson was the biggest loser among Republicans, that dubious honor went to John Edwards on the Democratic side.
The 2004 vice presidential candidate’s strident faux populist attacks on “corporate greed” only succeeded in making him look like Huey Long in a $400 haircut. Edwards’ poor third place showing means he’s unlikely to raise enough money or attract enough volunteers to compete seriously in future contests.
Exit polls showed Clinton, who is vying to become the first female president, won nearly half the women’s vote while Obama got only about a third. That marked a dramatic turnaround from Iowa, where Obama had narrowly edged out Clinton among women. Lower-income voters and senior citizens also favored Clinton.
Obama, seeking to become the first African-American president, may have a chance to regain momentum in the Jan. 19 South Carolina contest, where half of the Democratic turnout is expected to be black voters.
On the Republican side, it’s still anyone’s game. South Carolina’s numerous evangelical voters may give Huckabee a chance to repeat his Iowa success. McCain will try to parlay his New Hampshire win into another upset of Romney in the Jan. 15 Michigan primary. Giuliani needs a big win in the Jan. 29 Florida primary just to stay in the GOP game.
Thus, while Iowa and New Hampshire may not have settled either party’s nomination, they certainly performed their traditional winnowing out function. At this point, the surviving campaigns will stop talking about momentum and start counting delegates. The biggest harvest of delegates will be Feb. 5 when 23 states weigh in. That’s when Coloradans will caucus and delegate rich states like California, New York and New Jersey will hold primaries.
Until then, hang on for quite a ride.
For now, we can only salute New Hampshire’s independent-minded voters. They not only restored faith in the political process with a record turnout, they proved again that pollsters can’t tell them how to think.
