So it’s a big night for Mitt Romney, as he nearly hits the 40% mark. Also a good night for Ron Paul, who reversed what had seemed like a downward trend, cleared 20%, and scored a solid second place.
Everybody else lost big. Huntsman is done (at least as a GOP candidate), having staked everything on NH and come up way short. Newt and Santorum couldn’t break 10% – unsurprising for Newt, but surely a big disappointment for Santorum who utterly failed to capitalize on any kind of momentum coming out of Iowa. And the rest did embarrassingly badly – Rick Perry polled an astoundingly weak 0.7%.
As for the most important question, namely, which BMGer won the prediction contest, it’s between alexwill and shillelaghlaw, the only two who correctly predicted a Romney-Paul-Huntsman finish. Overall, it seems to me that alexwill got a tad closer to the mark (his call was Romney 35, Paul 22, Huntsman 18, Santorum 12, Gingrich 10, Perry 1), so congratulations!
Trickle up says
Score this is by the sum of deviations for each candidate, not with seeming tads.
By this metric, alexwill scored 10. Shillelaghlaw 16.
Alexwill narrowly beat out Suffolk, which got 11. Congratulations!
Will not score
my ownothers, so as not to embarrass anyone.David says
That’s what I did, just without the jargon.
Trickle up says
?
Alex W. says
To be fair to Suffolk, they had 7% undecided, so when you scale that out, and the minor candidates, they had Romney 41, Paul 19, Huntsman 17, Santorum 12, Gingrich 10. I thought Paul was gaining, which he was, and that Romney’s last day uptick was false, which it wasn’t.
SomervilleTom says
I think Ron Santorum’s egregious hate-speech is part of his South Carolina campaign. I think he’s pandering to the nauseating large racist, homophobic, fundamentalist, Bible-thumping segment of South Carolina voters.
I think Ron Santorum wrote off NH long ago. His appearance at New England College, in particular, was designed to provide an opportunity for him to get media coverage as a gay-basher. He was looking ahead to SC.
It will be interesting to see how Ron Santorum and the other not-Romney candidates fare in the Bible-belt South.
John Tehan says
His name is Rick – thankfully for him, he didn’t get the other nickname for Richard, imagine if his name was Dick Santorum? It would make his Google problem so much worse…
SomervilleTom says
Because I haven’t had enough coffee this morning.
I must say that I do find the not-Romney crowd blending together. Both Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are, in my opinion, playing parts in the same larger GOP scapegoating strategy.
This comment, however, was simply my own screw-up. It was not intentional, and I apologize.
johnd says
It seems to be coalescing nicely. Even those reluctant GOP voters will be voting for Mitt and the economy is not lining up well for President Obama.
I’m getting a good feeling about the race at this point.
PS Why are the talking heads getting tied in knots about Mitt talking like a conservative while he is clearly more moderate? Has that never happened before? How many presidential candidates lean one way during the primary and then back to the middle for the general election… all of them.
SomervilleTom says
Why is it that when GOP candidates “lean one way during a primary”, they lean towards race-baiting, gay-bashing misoygyny, and similar scapegoating?
Could it be that proposals to slash taxes (“9-9-9” and such malarky) and destroy government (as in everything the GOP House has done this year) aren’t attracting the hoped-for voters?
It’s one thing to lean towards the extremists in your “base”. It’s something else again to simply foment the scapegoating, bigotry, and racism that so many of our populace turns to in hard times (not unlike Germany in 1932).
It’s been obvious from the start of this nauseating GOP primary season that Mitt Romney will be the GOP nominee. It looks to me as though the GOP is using the primary season as an excuse to fire up the haters now, in order to use them against our first minority President in his re-election campaign.
johnk says
It will be nice defeating Willard. I have no idea why MA Republicans still support him the way they do. He killed the MA GOP. It’s kind of odd actually.
ms says
Look, Romney always had New Hampshire in the bag. The only way he could lose New Hampshire would be to freak out and go mental on camera. And that’s not happening.
In New Hampshire, unenrolled voters can vote in the primary elections of the one party they choose at the voting-place.
Ron Paul came in second. A lot of people that usually favor Democrats, but are registered unenrolled, voted Paul.
Why?
Paul is a strict isolationist who would end the wars. Some of the better Democrats also oppose the wars, but many support wars. It’s time that we end our empire and come home, and mind our business.
Paul wants to legalize drugs. It’s ridiculous that we jail people for putting things in their own bodies voluntarily. And, Prohibition of alcohol was good…. for Al Capone.
Paul’s economics are really bad. But, voting for him shows support for ending foreign wars and the drug wars. And, that’s why he came in second.