Is Obama the Only Reason?

Tue, January 08, 2008 - 11:23 AM

John McCain may very well score a win with today’s New Hampshire Republican primary.
But even with a victory in the Granite state, will come some troubling signs for the Arizona Republican.
And one thing is already clear: a McCain victory today will be a far cry from his 18 percentage point win over George W. Bush in 2000, when the Arizona senator grabbed almost 50 percent of the primary vote.
First, a final Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of New Hampshire GOP voters shows McCain going into today’s voting is clinging to a statistically insignificant one percentage point lead over Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. It’s McCain with 32 percent, and Romney with 31 percent.
But helping McCain to soar to his New Hampshire victory in 2000 was his support from independent voters.
And today, state officials are predicting 150,000 undeclared voters will participate in the voting – roughly 45 percent of the entire expected turnout of a about 500,000. That should be good news for McCain.
However, the officials also predict that 90,000 of those independent voters will decide to vote in the Democratic primary, and 60,000 for a Republican candidate.
Much already has been written about surveys that seem to substantiate the predictions that most of the independents will, as in Iowa, give their support to Democrat Barack Obama.
But is their excitement over Obama the only reason? It's also likely that McCain’s high-profile stanceon the Iraq war, and other harder-lined conservative positions he has taken in hopes of appealing to more voters within his own party's base, play a role, too.
-- Billy House