Romney sweeps NH to cement top status; Paul second

DAVID ESPO

STEVE PEOPLES

Asso­ci­ated Press

CONCORD, N.H. — Mitt Rom­ney cruised to a solid vic­tory in the New Hamp­shire pri­mary Tues­day night, pick­ing up steam from his first-place fin­ish in the lead-off Iowa cau­cuses and firmly estab­lish­ing him­self as the man to beat for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nomination.

“Tonight we made his­tory,” Rom­ney told cheer­ing sup­port­ers before piv­ot­ing to a sting­ing denun­ci­a­tion of Pres­i­dent Barack Obama. “The mid­dle class has been crushed,” in the past three years, he said, “our debt is too high and our oppor­tu­ni­ties too few” — remarks that made clear he intends to be viewed as the party’s nom­i­nee in wait­ing after only two contests.

His rivals said oth­er­wise, look­ing ahead to South Car­olina on Jan. 21 as the best place to stop the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor. Already, sev­eral con­tenders and com­mit­tees sup­port­ing them had put down heavy money to reserve time for tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing there.

Even so, the order of fin­ish — Ron Paul sec­ond, fol­lowed by Jon Hunts­man, Newt Gin­grich and Rick San­to­rum — scram­bled the field and pro­longed the increas­ingly des­per­ate com­pe­ti­tion to emerge as the true con­ser­v­a­tive rival to Romney.

Rom­ney fash­ioned his vic­tory despite a sus­tained assault by rivals eager to under­mine his claim as the con­tender best sit­u­ated to beat Obama and help reduce the nation’s painfully high unem­ploy­ment. Gin­grich led the way, sug­gest­ing at one point that Rom­ney was a cor­po­rate raider, rhetoric that the front-runner’s defend­ers said was more suit­able to a Demo­c­ra­tic oppo­nent than a con­ser­v­a­tive Republican.

Returns from 52 per­cent of New Hamp­shire precincts showed Rom­ney with 37 per­cent of the vote, fol­lowed by Texas Rep Paul with 23 per­cent, for­mer Utah Gov. Hunts­man with 17 per­cent and for­mer House Speaker Gin­grich and for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia Sen. San­to­rum with 10 per­cent each. With his vic­tory, Rom­ney became the first Repub­li­can to sweep the first two con­tests in com­pet­i­tive races since Iowa gained the lead-off spot in pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns in 1976.

Rom­ney won in Iowa by a scant eight votes over San­to­rum, and gained barely a quar­ter of the vote there.

On Tues­day, he bat­tled not only his rivals but also high expec­ta­tions as the bal­lots were counted, par­tic­u­larly since his pur­suers had vir­tu­ally con­ceded New Hamp­shire, next-door to the state Rom­ney gov­erned for four years.

Seek­ing to under­cut Romney’s vic­tory, Gin­grich and oth­ers sug­gested in advance that any­thing below 40 per­cent or so would indi­cate weak­ness by the nom­i­na­tion front-runner.

They didn’t men­tion that Sen. John McCain’s win­ning per­cent­age in the 2008 pri­mary was 37 percent.

Romney’s win was worth at least four del­e­gates to the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion next sum­mer. Paul earned at least two del­e­gates and Hunts­man at least one. Another four remained to be awarded, based on final vote totals.

“Tonight we cel­e­brate,” Rom­ney told his sup­port­ers. “Tomor­row we go back to work.”

Rightly so. Already, can­di­dates and polit­i­cal action com­mit­tees aligned with them were reserv­ing enor­mous amounts of tele­vi­sion time for the first-in-the-South pri­mary in lit­tle more than a week.

Unlike Iowa and New Hamp­shire, where unem­ploy­ment is well below the national aver­age, job­less­ness is far higher in South Car­olina. That cre­ates a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment for the race.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who skipped New Hamp­shire to get a head start in South Car­olina, said Tuesday’s results showed “the race for a con­ser­v­a­tive alter­na­tive to Mitt Rom­ney remains wide open.”

Hunts­man had staked his can­di­dacy on a strong show­ing in New Hamp­shire, and he announced after the polls closed that he had passed his own test. “Where we stand is a solid posi­tion and we go south from here,” he said.

About one-third of Repub­li­can vot­ers inter­viewed as they left their polling places said the most impor­tant fac­tor in choos­ing a can­di­date was find­ing some­one who could defeat Obama in the fall. Rom­ney won their sup­port overwhelmingly.

He ran even with Hunts­man among the one-quarter of the vot­ers who cited expe­ri­ence as the most impor­tant fac­tor in select­ing a can­di­date to support.

Paul ran first among vot­ers who cited moral char­ac­ter or true conservatism.

As was the case last week in Iowa, the econ­omy was the issue that mat­tered most to vot­ers, 61 per­cent of those sur­veyed. Another 24 per­cent cited record fed­eral deficits.

Rom­ney car­ried the first group and split the sec­ond with Paul.

The sur­vey results came from inter­views con­ducted for The Asso­ci­ated Press and the tele­vi­sion net­works with 2,636 vot­ers across the state. It had a mar­gin of sam­pling error of plus or minus 3 per­cent­age points.

New Hamp­shire has a rich his­tory of hum­bling favorites, front-runners and even an occa­sional incumbent.

The state’s Repub­li­can vot­ers embar­rassed Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush in 1992, when he won but was held to 53 per­cent of the vote against Pat Buchanan, run­ning as an insur­gent in dif­fi­cult eco­nomic times. Buchanan, who never held pub­lic office, won the pri­mary four years later over Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, who was the nom­i­nee in the fall.

In 2000, national front-runner George W. Bush rolled into the state after a con­vinc­ing first-place fin­ish in Iowa but wound up a dis­tant sec­ond behind McCain. Bush later won the GOP nom­i­na­tion and then the presidency.

Twelve Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion del­e­gates were at stake on Tues­day, out of 1,144 needed to win the nomination.

Obama was unop­posed in the Demo­c­ra­tic primary.

The state has about 232,000 reg­is­tered Repub­li­cans, 223,000 Democ­rats and 313,000 vot­ers who are unde­clared or independent.

In his first pres­i­den­tial run in 2008, Rom­ney fin­ished sec­ond in the state to McCain. This time, he cam­paigned with the Ari­zona senator’s endorse­ment, as well as back­ing from Sen. Kelly Ayotte and numer­ous other mem­bers of the state’s Repub­li­can establishment.

Rom­ney com­mit­ted a pair of unforced errors in the campaign’s final 48 hours, and the other con­tenders sought to capitalize.

On Sun­day, after a pair of week­end debates only 12 hours apart, the mil­lion­aire for­mer busi­ness­man said he under­stood the fear of being laid off. “There were a cou­ple of times when I was wor­ried I was going to get pink-slipped,” he said, although nei­ther he nor his aides offered specifics.

And on Mon­day, in an appear­ance before the Nashua Cham­ber of Com­merce, Rom­ney was dis­cussing health insur­ance cov­er­age when he said, “I like being able to fire peo­ple who pro­vide ser­vices to me. If some­one doesn’t give me the good ser­vice I need, I’m going to go get some­body else to pro­vide that ser­vice to me.”

Hunts­man, a for­mer Utah gov­er­nor, saw an open­ing. “Gov. Rom­ney enjoys fir­ing peo­ple. I enjoy cre­at­ing jobs,” he said.

And Gin­grich said Bain Cap­i­tal, the ven­ture cap­i­tal firm Rom­ney once headed, “appar­ently looted the com­pa­nies, left peo­ple totally unem­ployed and walked off with mil­lions of dollars.”

Rom­ney has made his busi­ness expe­ri­ence a cor­ner­stone of his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, say­ing that Bain on bal­ance cre­ated 100,000 jobs, and as a result, he under­stands how to help boost employment.

He sought to shrug off the attacks, say­ing he had expected them from Obama in the fall, but Gin­grich and oth­ers had decided to go first. “Things can always be taken out of con­text,” he said.

Posted by AP News on Jan 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.