There is an eerie similarity between the last two New Hampshire tracking polls reporting numbers as voters there go to the polls. Both the Rasmussen poll conducted Sunday evening and the Suffolk tracking poll condicted on Sunday and Monday nights show Mitt Romney with 37% of the vote. Both show Ron Paul in second place, at 17% and 18%, with Jon Huntsman just two points behind Paul in each case.
Rick Santorum gets 13% and 11% and Newt Gingrich 12% and 9%–statistically indistinguishable numbers. Rick Perry, as usual in New Hampshire, is at 1%. Rasmussen shows Romney’s percentage falling from that in its previous survey, while Suffolk shows him on the rise: they both converge on almost exactly the same numbers.
So Romney is the clear favorite, and not just to win, but to lap anyone else in the field by about 20 points. Paul and Huntsman seem to be in a race for second place, but the numbers show Santorum and Gingrich not so far behind. If these numbers are approximately correct, all six candidates will have a rationale for going on to South Carolina. Paul will go on whatever his numbers are. Ditto Gingrich, whose suspiciously specific description of his superPAC’s 27 minute anti-Romney film indicates he is determined to inflict damage on the man who (I think he believes) cheated him out of his world historical destiny.
Huntsman, unless he seriously underperforms the tracking poll numbers, will say that he is a plausible alternative to Romney, and so will Perry, who was clearly directing his responses at the Saturday and Sunday debates at South Carolina Republicans.
Santorum, some of the blogs are saying, made a mistake by engaging in New Hampshire and not going directly to South Carolina. But he had a skeleton campaign apparatus in New Hampshire and had made numerous campaign appearances there, if only to audiences much tinier than he has been able to attract over the last week. Having laid that groundwork, he could hardly stay away. It’s in his interest to show that he can attract substantial percentages of voters who do not classify themselves as evangelical and bornagain Christians, as Iowa winner Mike Huckabee was never able to do in 2008. It looks like he won’t do that in New Hampshire, but even a fifth-place finish will not be a reason to withdraw.
By the way, if Huntsman finishes second or third, it will be time to revive an old rule of presidential nominating politics, the rule that says you have to do intensive personal campaigning to win. I thought that rule was rendered obsolete when Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich zoomed to leads in Iowa polls despite having made almost no appearances there (in the cases of Perry and Cain) or not as many as some other candidates (Gingrich). But Iowa gave a first-place tie to the candidate who made the most appearances there, Rick Santorum, and there’s a good chance New Hampshire will give a second or third place to the candidate who made the most appearances there, Jon Huntsman.
