New Hampshire

The Manchester, New Hampshire Union Leader (whose editorial board favors the GOP, FWIW), has an interesting editorial on Hillary’s not-campaigning in Michigan and Florida (states that Democratic nomination contenders agreed to boycott, and which are supposed to have their delegates stripped from them):

COURTING VOTERS in Iowa and New Hampshire, last August Sen. Hillary Clinton signed a pledge not to “campaign or participate” in the Michigan or Florida Democratic primaries. She participated in both primaries and is campaigning in Florida. Which proves, again, that Hillary Clinton is a liar.

Clinton kept her name on the Michigan ballot when others removed theirs, she campaigned this past weekend in Florida, and she is pushing to seat Michigan and Florida delegates at the Democratic National Convention. The party stripped those states of delegates as punishment for moving up their primary dates.

“I will try to persuade my delegates to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida,” Clinton said last week, after the New Hampshire primaries and Iowa caucuses were safely over.

Clinton coldly and knowingly lied to New Hampshire and Iowa. Her promise was not a vague statement. It was a signed pledge with a clear and unequivocal meaning.

She signed it thinking that keeping the other candidates out of Michigan and Florida was to her advantage, but knowing she would break it if that proved beneficial later on. It did, and she did.

New Hampshire voters, you were played for suckers.

I’m not sure that I’d say that New Hampshire Voters were played for suckers.

I’d just remember that the Clinton family is the institution that brought us contortionistic interpretations of reality and weaselly statements, including my all-time favorite: “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”

Listen, I think that Bill Clinton was a pretty good President, even if I wouldn’t leave my hypothetical daughter in the same room alone with the man. And, I don’t mean to deny, discount, or dismiss some of the really scuzzy things the GOP has done in recent years.

But why don’t I see some Dems remembering the scandals and the non-stop spinning that too place around Bill Clinton when they consider attempting to put another Clinton in the White House?

Some of you may be aware of the Free State Project—a program by some “big-ell” and “small-ell” libertarians, frustrated with failing to achieve critical mass on the national scene, to get a bunch of similarly-minded folks to move to a smallish state, and use that as a base to influence local and state politics (and eventually to expand outward from there).

The state chosen to “take over” was New Hampshire. The thought is that if Free State Project members can make up 1% of the population of the state, that will be enough to to influence local and state politics in a more libertarian direction.

Some of the folks participating in the Free State Project have fulfilled their pledge to move to New Hampshire. So, Jason Sorens has taken a look at how they might have influenced the primary.

The punchline of the long article:

The main result from the regression analysis is that every additional Free Stater per 100 Republican primary voters resulted in approximately 2.5 percentage points improvement in Ron Paul’s share of the vote in that town. Thus, in Grafton, Free Staters represented 4% of Republican primary voters (we don’t know that they all voted, or voted Republican, or even supported Ron Paul, of course), and the model predicts that if no Free Staters lived in Grafton, Ron Paul would have gotten 13% of the vote, instead of 23% (23-0.4*2.5). [...] What that means that we definitely know that Free Staters influenced the election beyond their own votes.

Some random items that have flown through my mind this morning:

• While driving in to the office this morning, I heard an interview on POTUS 08 with a Zogby staffer, where the obvious question was asked: why were the Democratic polls seemingly so off?
   
  Two working theories were offered.  First, most publicized polls tend to run over multiple days.  It’s been observed that shortly after “big news” (like Obama’s win /Clinton’s loss in Iowa), a 2-3 day major bump can occur in polling, as folks react with their guts before their brains catch up.  Given the short window between Iowa and New Hampshire, polls hadn’t had a chance to fully reflect the erosion of that quick, short-term bump.  Apparently the latest couple of daily polling data (not publicized, but merged into Zogby’s last 3 day poll) had started looking much closer.
   
  Second, the Zogby minion pointed out that exit polling suggested that about 18% of D voters made up their minds in the last 24 hours of the New Hampshire campaign.  That creates a high level of uncertainty which, in a close, highly hyped race, can’t be accurately reflected in the polls.
    
• Periodically, I’ve wondered if the public wouldn’t be better served if election law prohibited redistribution of polling results in the week leading up to an election.  I wouldn’t prohibit polling, partly for Constitutional reasons, and partly because it does provide theoretically useful information to candidates…but I wonder if legislation (or an FEC reg) could be crafted so that such information couldn’t be passed along to third parties.
    
  Granted, I don’t know that a ban would be effective in this day and age of rampant media links and the apparent breadth of political blogging, but it would be an interesting tactic to reduce any bias such data might introduce into the minds of voters.
    
  Such a moratorium is one I’ve thought about off and on in the past.  However, given the surprise results last night, and some of the anecdotal comments of how potential Obama voters might have stayed home, or flipped over to the GOP primary….
   
• One other comment I’ve heard in a couple of different venues this morning is that it’s probably good for the D’s that New Hampshire turned out as it did.  
   
  If Obama were to go on to become the Democratic nominee, it would presumably be better experience for him to be further battle-tempered by going against Hillary for a bit longer.
   
  Similarly, while Hillary may be sufficiently tested by fire, she could use the additional campaigning to better hone her skills and fine-tune her message ahead of going against the GOP (and Bloomberg, if he does enter the ring).

Mmm….politics, stats, and maps….

The Boston Globe has a pair of nifty mashups to permit interested folks to see where the New Hampshire votes are coming from.  The Dems’ map is here, while the GOP map is here.

The Democratic map is far more interesting, I must admit.  The GOP map shows most towns in the state appearing to have gone for McCain.

So much for the wisdom of the polls.  From MSNBC:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won New Hampshire’s Democratic primary Tuesday night, pulling out a stunning victory over Sen. Barack Obama in a contest that she had been forecast to lose.

On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain defeated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and climbed back into contention for their party’s presidential nomination.

My wife’s been in control of the TiVo remote tonight, so I’ve had to suffice with web updates

Naturally the GOP story of the night is that Romney’s hurting (although I would have expected him to do worse, from all the hoopla) but the GOP race remains entertaining at least until we see if Giuliani can salvage Florida.

Meanwhile, the Dems have shown not to take excessive polling too seriously.  The hype would have had you believe that tonight would be an Obama blowout.   Nevertheless, I think we’re safely down to a two donkey race.

The two most interesting comments I saw in random blog-surfing waiting for the declaration to be made are:

• Rumors of Clinton supporters forming a 527 to swift-boat Obama; and
• Speculation that Obama’s big lead may actually have depressed turnout a little.  (Although I wonder if it might be that some independents shifted parties to vote for a GOP candidate of their choice.)

Super Tuesday could prove to be most entertaining.

The surest way to get me to vote for your opponent is for you to robocall me.  (Setting aside some campaigns’ dirty tricks of making it seem that their opponents are making robocalls.)

I am not alone in holding such a view, judging by a quote in WaPo’s “The Trail” blog:

Ray Rich, 57, an artist and Republican from Hillsboro, said Friday at the Mike Huckabee event in Henniker that he liked Romney’s stance on Social Security. But today Rich turned against Romney.

“I voted for John McCain because I thought he had the best chance of beating Romney. I received countless [pre-recorded] phone calls from the Romney campaign, and the feeling I got from them was a very cold feeling. They were extremely negative, slamming other candidates. I was just so put off by that that I attempted to strategically vote to block him.”

In my office, we talk about the 5 P’s: “Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance”.

This post at Washington Wire has me wondering if someone in New Hampshire failed to practice the 5 P’s:

The New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office is shipping additional ballots out across the state today as some towns raise concerns that they could run out of ballots. The ballot shortage appears to be disproportionately on the Democratic side, indicating that the state’s Independent voters, who make up 44% of registered voters, are breaking to the Democrats.

“The Democratic ballot seems to be the ballot of choice,” said Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan in an interview early this afternoon. As a precaution, the office has already shipped additional ballots today to Portsmouth, Hampton Falls, and additional sea coast towns. Scanlan said ballots were also being shipped to the towns of Hudson, Pelham, and Keene, and additional ballots were shipped to Hanover on Monday. Scanlan said there are no concerns that anyone would be denied a ballot. “We do have processes to deal with it,” he said. “At this point no one has run out of ballots.”

So, ya think turnout might be a little high today in New Hampshire?

The early results are in from Dicksville Notch (via Reliable Politics):

• Dems
• Obama 7
• Edwards 2
• Richardson 1
• GOP
• McCain 4
• Romney 2
• Giuliani 1

Seen on the newswire:

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich filed a complaint with the FCC on Friday after ABC News excluded him, fellow Democrat Mike Gravel and Republican Duncan Hunter from its prime-time debates on Saturday.

Kucinich argued that ABC is violating equal-time provisions by keeping him out of the debate and noted that ABC’s parent Walt Disney Co. had contributed to campaigns involving the four Democrats who were invited.[...]

The network set rules to narrow the field. Candidates had to meet at least one of three criteria: place first through fourth in Iowa, poll 5 percent or higher in one of the last four major New Hampshire surveys, or poll 5 percent or higher in one of the last four major national surveys.

While I appreciate the argument raised by Kucinich…you have to ask yourself: can’t an argument be made that “equal time” shouldn’t necessarily apply to nonviable candidates, assuming (of course) an adequately broad definition of “viable”?

Given that the primary campaign has already been underway for about a year, and yet Kucinich barely registers in the polls…I’d have to say he’s not viable under any definition.

As might be expected, the political two-thirds of the U.S. sector in blogsville is abuzz with some quick dissection of yesterday’s caucuses, before turning speculation to Tuesday’s primary in New Hampshire.

One comment that caught my eye was over at Politico, where it was observed:

If Romney loses again in New Hampshire, where he had until recently been leading, his candidacy will go on life support.

You know….I realize that the ‘08 campaign cycle is unique, and it’s probably risky to attempt to draw comparisons to prior elections.   However, I can’t help but be reminded of ‘96, where Buchanan did surprisingly well in Iowa and New Hampshire, before fading in more relevant states, permitting Dole to win the nomination.

Buchanan was also a populist figure with strong conservative Christian credentials, although the similarity ends when you contrast Buchanan’s abrasiveness to Huckabee’s nice guy exterior.

Ah well…just a random thought on my part.   Let the circus continue!