NRO’s Jim Geraghty:

I’m told the exit polls indicate voters didn’t like Mitt Romney’s ads, thought he went too negative. New Hampshire didn’t have the “play nice” attitude that Iowa had, but I wonder if Romney stood out a little too much with his contrast ads, compared to everyone else.

Meanwhile, Romney says he’s “gotten two silvers and one gold…. thank you Wyoming.” He seems remarkably chipper, considering.

Update: Romney plays the change card – his first point: voters “have heard Washington say they’re going to change immigration, but they haven’t.” Wonder who that was aimed at?

John McCain, Mitt Romney, New Hampshire | 3 Comments »

Let’s get this party started!

For results:

The Concord Monitor

WMUR 9 New Hampshire

CNN

ABC

MSNBC

(UPDATE by Dave) So NBC has called it for McCain. Let me be contrarian and say that this is good news for Mike Huckabee. Romney is fatally wounded (sorry, Tagg!) and the road to the nomination still goes through South Carolina, where Huckabee is 20 points up and didn’t hurt himself tonight. Plus Huckabee is leading in Florida and Giuliani is back in fourth (and anyway, Giuliani’s done; he actually competed in New Hampshire and got crushed). I still think Huckabee’s the money bet.

New Hampshire | 14 Comments »

Bay Buchanan was on CNN this morning all but conceding Mitt Romney’s defeat to John McCain in the New Hampshire primary.  She intimated that the Arizona senator would prove himself to be a one-state winner, with echoes of 2000.  Then she argued that Mitt Romney would show that he’s the nominee through a Michigan victory.

I wish I could also get paid a lot of money to rationalize losing. It’s about as likely that Romney is going to put together a victory through Michigan as it is that his father actually marched with Martin Luther King in the 1960s.

It’s been awhile since there was any polling done in the state.  But the most recent measures did not look good for Mitt – Rasmussen’s Dec. 8 poll showed Huckabee taking the lead, and we all know what happened in the last state where that occurred.  What’s more, it appears that Michiganders were so enamored of Romney after the October debate in Dearborn that they put Rudy Giuliani ahead of him in a November poll.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Michigan has lost half of its delegates for bucking Republican Party rules and moving the date of the primary up to Jan. 15.  That means that even if Romney wins, he won’t be able to claim a decisive delegate count as evidence of his momentum.

So what’s really going on out there in Michigan?  McCain is making a significant press, according to the Ann Arbor News, with two events planned in the state over the coming week.  Dawson Bell at the Detroit Free Press points out that McCain has a variety of endorsements in the state, as well as organization to put up a fight against Romney.  And he also warns of the unsettled state of the Republican electorate, highlighting Huckabee’s recent gains among the state’s religious conservatives.  That can’t be good news for Romney, whose loss of “values voters” to Huckabee in Iowa proved his undoing.  In a state that has had its economy sundered by the global marketplace, the former Arkansas Governor’s cracks about not wanting to elect the guy that took your job away from you ought to ring true.

For a formerly presumptive frontrunner who told us he’d run away with the early contests, telling us you’ll pull it out in the third real contest (since not even Romney is trumpeting his Wyoming victory) doesn’t sound too hopeful.  It might be time to pull the family car into the rest stop and hose down the dog again.

John McCain, Michigan, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney | 1 Comment »

Josh Marshall wonders if Romney might have regained a touch of momentum just before the polls open. Either way, he suggests that, when you consider the bigger picture, it would be more than premature to suppose that a victory in New Hampshire would vault John McCain to the nomination:

The next big fight is in South Carolina. And two new polls out today (Rasmussen and SurveyUSA) show Huckabee in a dominant position in the state. So Huckabee looks likely to take Secessionville with either McCain or Romney coming in second.

At that point you’ll have to say that Huckabee, who the GOP establishment is roundly against, is the frontrunner in the campaign. And the others are going to coalesce around an anti-Huckabee candidate. It’s not clear to me that McCain is a shoe-in for that role.

McCain is, for the most part, just another right-wing Republican. But his tentative heresies on issues like campaign finance, global warming, and immigration are still a problem in his relationship with the GOP establishment. That establishment, while hardly united behind any single candidate, has generally expressed a good deal more interest in candidates like Romney, Giuliani, and even Fred Thompson. There may be voter movement behind McCain right now – but the whole point of being an establishment is that you don’t want the voters to ruin everything by deciding these things for themselves.

It may or may not be in the GOP establishment’s power to make the decision, at this late date, as to who will be the anti-Huckabee. But they’ll try, and there’s no particular reason to believe that they’ll try to make it McCain.

Fred Thompson, John McCain, Michael Bloomberg, Mitt Romney, New Hampshire, Rudy Giuliani, South Carolina | No Comments »

It truly is exciting today, here in this small, mostly white state out in flyover country, where a small subset of Americans will cast their ballot and determine the fate of the GOP hopefuls. The media crush is simply amazing, everywhere you look there’s another reporter. And the polling has been so non-stop that you expect another one after the caucusues are over! Yes, the eyes of the nation are truly upon Wyoming today!

Wait, you haven’t heard about it?

Don’t forget Wyoming. It’s been overlooked in the hoopla surrounding Thursday’s Iowa caucuses and next week’s New Hampshire primary, but Wyoming Republicans will caucus Saturday and choose delegates to the national convention in September.Candidates have paid little attention to the state, though.

Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter and Ron Paul have passed through since September. Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain have not.

“Yes, there have been some appearances by the candidates in this state that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred this early in the process,” said Jim King, who teaches political science at the University of Wyoming. “But candidates are where the media are — in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

This is an example of how truly arbitrary this whole selection process is. The media isn’t covering Wyoming because they’ve decided New Hampshire is more important, and anyway who wants to go to Wyoming after spending all that time in Iowa? So they ignore it, which causes the candidates to ignore it, because the important thing about these early races is the bump and not the win. Not that Wyoming should be decisive, but there’s no real reason it should be dramatically less decisive than Iow and New Hampshire; all they have going for them is history. This is exhibit A of why the whole system needs an overhaul.

The good news here for Fred Thompson is that it’s another state he gets to skip! And a roar went up in Thompson headquarters. Or a snore. Or something.

UPDATE: Mitt-mentum!  

CHEYENNE, Wyoming: U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney grabbed the early lead in Wyoming’s Republican caucuses Saturday as the state had its brief moment in the political spotlight between the traditional attention-getting contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

This is good news for John McCain.

UPDATE II: With 83% of precincts reporting Romney has 70% of the delegates, Freddie Thompson 20%, and Duncan Hunter 10%. Hugh Hewitt just had a heart palpitation.

Wyoming | 1 Comment »

Have at it! Predictions? Updates? Comments?

Right now the Iowa Republican Party’s website is running about as slow as Fred Thompson on a good day, so we’re going to have to find our results elsewhere.

TPM is doing a live update, and of course all of the networks are as well.

[Update: Well the networks are calling it already for Mike Huckabee. That didn't take long did it?]

Iowa, Mike Huckabee | 3 Comments »

With Iowa ready to explode in an ethanol-fuled burst of Caucus-going, the editors of the Right’s Field have been chatting amongst themselves about what we think will go down.  And I’m personally ready to put my predictions out in the open.

In Iowa, it’s going to be Romney by a nose with Huckabee right behind him, and McCain not too far off, but a decisive third.  And it’s going to shake out a similar way in New Hampshire, with Romney taking it, but McCain not far behind him again.

Based on this prediction, you might conclude that I think Romney is going to run away with the nomination, but that’s uncertain.  What is certain that after a pair of “first in the nation” contests that prove indecisive, Iowa and New Hampshire, at least on the GOP side, will prove they’re no longer the testing grounds of presidential politics.  States like Wyoming, Florida, and Michigan are already in full-on revolt against the current primary system, and the chorus they are building will only get louder after 2008.  With a pair of narrow margins of victory for one candidate in the two states, Iowans and New Hampshireans will show that they are just as conflicted about the candidates as the rest of the country, and not the decisive, sound-minded judges of political character that we have assumed them to be.

But don’t take my word for it, look at what the campaigns themselves are doing.  The most recent evidence is the anti-Mormon smear campaign against Mitt Romney in South Carolina uncovered by CNN.  They reported yesterday on the phony holiday greeting sent to South Carolinians by “the Romney family” that plays up the Mormon faith’s history of polygamy.

What the tactic says is that while we’re a couple of weeks out from South Carolina, the campaigns are convinced that there will be no decisive victory in the Hawkeye or the Granite States for the Republican field.  It’s going to be a bruising two months, especially for the Republicans, and the winner is going to have to marshal limited momentum into deft organization as February’s “national primary” day speeds forward like a mack truck.  While it’s going to be fun to watch, it’ll be bad for those Iowa and New Hampshire power brokers grasping to hold onto their current positions.

Iowa, Mitt Romney, New Hampshire, South Carolina | 3 Comments »

I’m enjoying the GOP freak-out over Mike Huckabee as much as everyone else, but let me add a word of caution — given realities on the ground in Iowa and other states, the whole Huckabee bubble could wind up bursting pretty quickly.

I spent some time a while ago insisting that Huckabee wasn’t a frontrunner. Now he is one, but only in certain respects. If you’ve read today’s NYT piece on Huckabee and the Republican race, you will have been reminded of one of the key disparities between Huckabee’s campaign and that of his major rival: organization. Mitt Romney has been building his Iowa machine with great steadiness and care over the past year. Romney’s organization, in Iowa and in general, is what has made a frontrunner out of a man who would otherwise be no more apparent a choice for the nomination than the already-forgotten Tommy Thompson. And a key part of that organization will come into play on January 3.

As the Times notes:

Mr. Huckabee has been ramping up his organization in Iowa, but it still remains far behind Mr. Romney’s. The campaign recently doubled the office space at its headquarters in downtown Des Moines; it now has 17 paid employees in Iowa, up from 3 over the summer. The campaign is broadcasting commercials in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and is preparing its first mailing in Iowa.

But the campaign remains bare bones in many ways. It has not had the money to do any polling. The campaign predicts that it will have precinct captains in the major caucus precincts, but not in all of them. Mr. Huckabee’s Iowa state director, Eric Woolson, got a BlackBerry only about a month ago.

Jonathan Martin has explained what Huckabee’s organizational deficiencies mean in terms of his key constituency:

The caucuses are still “an organizational exercise when you get right down to it,” Woolson adds, dropping the bar another notch. “And Romney has been here for a long time with a lot of people and a lot of money.”

Spin aside, every Iowa Republican contacted for this story cites Huckabee’s utter lack of a campaign structure as his most formidable obstacle to win.

“There’s no such thing as any Huckabee ground game that I see at all,” observes Failor.

Televangelist Pat Robertson maximized the Christian community in Iowa to finish a surprise second in 1988, Failor notes, but he did so with a 99-county organization that had been built over many months.

“The church community is excitable, energizable and movable, but if you don’t have apparatus to move those people on caucus night it doesn’t matter,” Failor says. “It’s all about organization – always has been and always will be.’

It’s instructive to compare Martin’s analysis of Huckabee’s Iowa organization with his piece on Romney’s.

Huckabee’s surge may be coming just late enough in the game to hit the polls at its peak. But everything now rides on the expectations game. If the enthusiasm cools just a little over the next two weeks, if the churches Huckabee’s counting on for his ground game can’t quite deliver, if Romney’s disciplined organization really is worth a few extra points on caucus day, then the story of January 3 could be of Romney surging and Huckabee fading.

Iowa, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney | 4 Comments »

Maybe I was wrong.

Rudy Giuliani’s advisers announced in November that they would rely on a decisive victory in Florida to rocket him toward the Republican nomination for president. That dream of orange-tinged momentum conquering all may be over if the snapshot presented by the latest Rasmussen poll is reliable.

Rasmussen puts Giuliani in third place in Florida, behind Mitt Romney at second and Mike Huckabee in first place. Huckabee gets 27% of voters, and Giuliani now only wins over 19%.

It would appear that news of the “shag fund” has taken Giuliani down a peg. At last voters who were formerly able to overlook the former New York City Mayor’s past peccadilloes believe that his purported security credentials are less important than the scandals left in his wake. Combined with the state’s religious conservatives thinking they have finally found their man in Huckabee, it’s awful, awful news for Giuliani.

If there is any silver-lining here, it’s that Rasmussen says that less than half of the voters are certain that Huckabee or Romney (or anyone else for that matter) are their final picks, and for 18% of the voters who said they had a second choice, Giuliani was their man.

But it sounds like Giuliani is going to have to fight like hell if he’s going to get Florida’s voters back on his side. He’s got no shot of winning in Iowa or New Hampshire, and dropping Florida would represent a complete implosion of his strategy.

Florida, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani | 3 Comments »

Hey you guys – stop making jokes about Mrs. Paul’s balls.

Tomorrow, you may remember, is the deadline to vote for Yankee Magazine’s cookie primary.  And which candidate’s recipe is the winner?  Oh, you didn’t have to think about that one too hard, did you?

Because with just shy of 10,000 votes on the night of December 13, Carol Paul’s Apricot-Coconut Balls have received 93% of the vote!  The Cookie Monster, between stuffing Mrs. Paul’s balls in his mouth, was apparently stuffing the cookie primary ballot box, too. As goes Mrs. Paul’s balls, so goes the nation?

Alas, while the Paul fans may be gearing up for their cookie party, they can’t declare decisive victory yet.  We’ll have to leave that to our panel of expert tasters at Southern New Hampshire University who will be like a small caucus of voters themselves.

In the meanwhile, for those of you who will fix every online Ron Paul-related vote that you can, just remember not to eat too many of Mrs. Paul’s balls or you’ll turn into a blimp.

New Hampshire, Ron Paul | No Comments »