Predictions on the New Hampshire vote
On the Republican side, John McCain will do better than the pre-vote polling shows. Huckabee will look worse. Romney and Thompson should perform okay, but it will clearly be McCain’s night.
On the Democratic side, I expect Hillary will outperform expectations and polls. If her second place finish moves it back to single digits, she’ll be able to claim a significant shift in momentum. Edwards, too, should gain more than the polling numbers indicate. He definitely can’t afford any erosion at this point.
So the call I made around Christmas continues to hold: both sides have three serious contenders who’ll remain.
A clearer picture should emerge after South Carolina, because from here on out, the Clinton campaign will be running at the top of its game, trying to wrest frontrunner staus from Obama on February 5th. As well, if Huckabee’s going to remain in the top trio, his strength is going to have to be demonstrated in SC and FL. The non-fundamentalist Republican campaign financiers will be watching to see if Romney can gain a toehold with actual voters throughout January; if not, they’ll be shifting their love to McCain soon after.
I’ll do very limited primary blogging tonight, focusing only on any surprises that may emerge.
January 8th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Kevin–
As of around 8:45 EST, with around 1/5 of the vote in Hillary is ahead of Barack, around 40 to 38. Were she to win, it’s a horserace again. Absurd, really, that if she were to lose by one vote, many would say she should drop out!!! Instead, rumors of the Barack putaway were a bit premature. No matter what I think spinning rights go to Hillary over this one, unless Barack breaks away in an unexpected direction. She still has to contend with slipping national polls and being out of money.
I quipped yesterday that if I were Hillary, I would have called Republicans and Independents in NH to get them to vote for her, rather than McCain, as it’s in the Republicans interest to keep the Democrats fighting. Hey- maybe she did. At least “the cry” won’t be this year’s scream– and Edwards pouncing on her with sexist crap can EAT crap, IMHO. He may as well drop out now.
I think the big story will be the win for the GOP establishment– it looks like it will get wins (or at least a close second in the case of Mrs. C.) from BOTH candidates it wants on the ballot in November!!!