The New Hampshire Primary

NY Times ^ | 1/27/04

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

The New Hampshire primaries are hard to predict for two main reasons, said Linda L. Fowler, director of the Rockefeller Center for Social Science at Dartmouth. First, the rules make it uncommonly difficult for pollsters to determine who is going to vote. Second, New Hampshire voters tend to change their minds at the last moment.

Under the rules, voters can register at the polls on the day of the primary, and about 10 percent of those who voted in the 2000 primaries did so.

In addition, 38 percent of the registered voters are independents. They can vote in whichever party primary they choose. Presumably, since the Democratic contest is the only one this week, a larger proportion of the undeclared voters will vote Democratic than did so four years ago when both parties had primaries. But the pollsters have no way of knowing what that proportion will be.

As for voters deciding late how to vote, 10 percent of Republicans and 15 percent of Democrats said as they left polling places in 2000 that they had not made up their minds until that day, and 36 percent of Republicans and 47 percent of Democrats said they had decided in the last week.

New Hampshire Primary (as of 8:50 pm, ET) Reporting: 34%
Candidate	Votes	%
John Kerry	24,339	39.1%
Howard Dean	15,151	24.3%
John Edwards	7,896	12.7%
Wesley K Clark	7,383	11.9%
Joseph I Lieberman	5,844	9.4%
Dennis J Kucinich	930	1.5%
Randy Crow	284	0.5%
Richard A Gephardt	123	0.2%
Al Sharpton	105	0.2%
R. Randy Lee	49	0.1%
Willie Felix Carter	29	0.0%
Edward Thomas O'Donnell Jr.	29	0.0%
Lyndon H LaRouche Jr.	28	0.0%
Carol Moseley Braun	24	0.0%
Katherine Bateman	20	0.0%
Robert H Linnell	14	0.0%
Vincent S Hamm	14	0.0%
Gerry Dokka	11	0.0%
Caroline Pettinato Killeen	9	0.0%
George W Bush (Write-in)	3	0.0%
Harry W Braun III	2	0.0%
Leonard Dennis Talbow	2	0.0%
Mildred Glover	2	0.0%
Fern Penna	1	0.0%
Hillary Rodham Clinton (Write-in)	1	0.0%

[cripplecreek]

thats funny, bush got more votes than hitlery.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Looks like Kerry's the sacrficial Dem lamb to lose against Bush.