Posted on 01/27/2004 5:53:46 PM PST by 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%
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