2008 Election Forecast: New Hampshire’s GOP Edge No Longer Written in Granite

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2008 Election Forecast: New Hampshire’s GOP Edge No Longer Written in Granite
By Rachel Kapochunas, CQ Staff

CQ Politics Presidential Race Rating: No Clear Favorite


Electoral Votes: 4

New Hampshire Republicans hope, fervently, that this year’s elections will be nothing like those in 2006, a historically bad year for their party. And they are counting on McCain — who scored wins in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary both during his unsuccessful try for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination and his successful bid this year — to turn the tide back in their favor.

Unlike the other five New England states, which regularly provide Democratic presidential candidates with comfortable margins, New Hampshire is one that even Obama advocates have to write into their column in pencil rather than indelible ink.

The state in the region least eager to abandon its Yankee Republican traditions, New Hampshire went for Bush over Gore in 2000 by 1.3 percentage points — and though it was the only state to flip its four electoral votes from Republican that year to Democratic in 2004, it went for Kerry over Bush by the exact same tight margin.

The national anti-Republican mood during the 2006 campaign brought New Hampshire past the tipping point, as Democrats unseated both of the state’s Republican U.S. House members, gained control of the state legislature and celebrated a second-term landslide for popular Gov. John Lynch .

The image of a political maverick that McCain has sought to cultivate over many years is the foundation of the support Republican activists hope he draws this November. “I don’t think people associate him, for example, with the Bush administration the way they might with a more conventional Republican,” state GOP Chairman Fergus Cullen said. He also described McCain as “the best possible candidate we could have as a nominee from a New Hampshire perspective, especially in this environment.”

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