By Jackie Calmes
And Laura Meckler
The Wall Street Journal
NASHUA, N.H.—The outcome of tomorrow’s close U.S. presidential primary vote in New Hampshire could be decisive for the Republicans: A loss for either John McCain or Mitt Romney may prove to be a mortal blow.

Mr. McCain, the Arizona senator, has made New Hampshire his make-or-break comeback state after his front-running campaign all but collapsed last summer. Yesterday he continued to gain in state polls and endorsements on Mr. Romney. But with no money and little organization elsewhere, even supporters concede tomorrow’s vote is do or die.

“We gotta win in New Hampshire, we need to win in New Hampshire, I think we’re gonna win in New Hampshire,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, campaigning up north for his Senate friend.

For Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, to lose the state next door would be humiliating—all the more so after last week’s upset loss to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in Iowa’s kickoff caucuses.

Mr. Romney had based his strategy on winning the first two states. Even before the Iowa defeat, he had lost his New Hampshire polling lead to a revived Mr. McCain. Now, with little time to brake Mr. McCain’s momentum, he has been thrown on the defensive by all of his rivals, who sense blood.

Whatever happens in New Hampshire, the final McCain-Romney showdown could come next week in Michigan—the state where Mr. Romney’s father was governor, and which Mr. McCain won in his 2000 nomination fight against George W. Bush.

“Whoever loses” in New Hampshire “is mortally wounded and will probably be finished off in Michigan,” predicts John Weaver, the chief strategist to Mr. McCain until the campaign ran aground last summer.

The Democrats’ primary tomorrow also will be critical. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is trying to recover from her Iowa loss and winner Barack Obama, the Illinois senator, has erased her longtime polling lead here.

Yet uncommitted Democrats insist that Mrs. Clinton, with a machine co-piloted by former President Clinton and deep support nationally, could lose here on top of Iowa, lose the Democrats’ Jan. 26 primary in South Carolina, and still win the nomination. She would do so on the strength of victories Feb. 5, “Super Tuesday,” when more than 20 states hold contests. Mr. Clinton is reminding one and all that he lost five states in 1992 before winning one, yet went on to be president.

Complicating calculations, Democrat Obama and Republican McCain are competing across party lines for independents, who comprise the biggest voting bloc and can cast ballots in either primary. But unlike 2000, when Mr. McCain’s maverick candidacy won their votes to pad his 19-point win over Mr. Bush, this year many independents are antiwar. Mr. McCain is perhaps the highest-profile supporter of the effort in Iraq. Polls show many leaning to Mr. Obama.

Romney backers hope Mr. Obama takes those votes. “Then the Republican primary will be very Republican, and that’s good” for Mr. Romney, says Tom Rath, a prominent New Hampshire Republican who is a senior strategist for the campaign.

A second defeat for Mr. Romney “would be tough, but a strong second would mean that he could go on,” adviser Ben Ginsberg said. He predicted a Romney win in Michigan and then “surprises” in South Carolina’s Jan. 19 Republican primary, the first where he’ll benefit from low expectations. Mr. Romney has struggled for support in South Carolina because he is suspect among many of the Christian conservatives so influential there, because of his support in Massachusetts for abortion rights, gay rights and gun control—positions he has reversed—and because of his Mormon faith.

Unlike Mr. McCain, whose campaign operates on credit and volunteer strategists, the wealthy Mr. Romney can continue to supplement his well-greased organization from his bankroll as contributions slack off. But without victories, he will find it hard to justify going on.

Also, the Republican establishment, long favorably inclined to Mr. Romney, now frets that the candidates’ battle to date—by highlighting his many policy flip-flops—has damaged him as a potential nominee against the Democrats. If Mr. McCain were to make a comeback, Republicans say, he would regain his standing as the Republican most likely to beat a Democrat. That “electability” argument would power his candidacy in a field that many Republican voters view as flawed.

Mark McKinnon, Mr. McCain’s media adviser, acknowledged the stakes are high for both men tomorrow. But, he argued, “If Romney doesn’t win I think he’s out. If McCain doesn’t win and it’s close, I think he’s still in.”

In Michigan, the state where Mr. Romney announced his candidacy last winter as a sign of its importance in the nominating sweepstakes, he has the best organization. Yet polls show him scrambling against Mr. Huckabee, who routed him last week in Iowa.

The New Hampshire results could go a long way toward influencing Michigan Republican voters, with just a week separating their primaries.

Tomorrow’s results will help determine if Rudy Giuliani miscalculated in campaigning little in the early-voting states. In effectively ceding New Hampshire to Mr. Romney, he left a void that Mr. McCain has now filled. A McCain victory, in particular, could threaten Mr. Giuliani’s bid to be seen as the moderate choice in the race, and thus the most electable.

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By Beverley Wang
Associated Press Writer

HOOKSETT, NH — Would a Rudy Giuliani administration be populated with a cabinet of Republican rivals and a powerful, all-knowing vice president like Dick Cheney?

more stories like thisPossibly, according to musings Giuliani shared in answers to questions from New Hampshire voters Wednesday evening in Hooksett.

Asked to differentiate himself from Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war and veteran of the U.S. senate, and ahead of him in the polls, Giuliani won chuckles from the audience with his quip: "Primarily, we're two different people."

Giuliani then praised McCain as "a hero and a very good man" before going on to tout his own executive experience as the former mayor of New York. "More often than not the American people seem to prefer people with executive experience for the presidency," he said.

Later, Giuliani pivoted from a question about potential picks for secretary of state to this: "Let me answer with the question of what you would look for in a vice president first -- again without any presumption that I'm going to be the nominee."

In an answer that mentioned Cheney more than once, Giuliani said, "A vice president has to be a partner in the administration. The vice president has to know everything that's going on, just in case the vice president has to step in at a moment's notice," he said. He added that during a conversation with Cheney on Sept. 11, 2001, he felt the vice president "had a sense that he knew what he was doing."

Following his train of thought to cabinet picks, Giuliani left the door open in his administration for rivals like McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and others currently battling him for the Republican nomination.

"You could do what Abe Lincoln did," Giulani said as he referred to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on Lincoln, "Team of Rivals."

"Abraham Lincoln basically selected all of his opponents to be in his cabinet -- all his Republican opponents," Giuliani said. "Each one of them began with the idea that they were better qualified to be president than he was, and they all left realizing that they weren't, and that gives you a sense of a man of great confidence."

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By By David Espo
Associated Press

MANCHESTER, NH — So long, ethanol. Hello, taxes.

More than geography changes when the 2008 presidential campaign leaves the land of flat -- aka Iowa -- for New Hampshire, the Granite State.

The electorate is different, and the blend of issues.

Which may be why former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's made-for-Iowa television ad tagline, "Christian leader," has yet to make the trip east across the Mississippi River. In New England, he's a conservative leader.

And why Ron Paul, as close to a libertarian as there is in the Republican race, may yet prove a spoiler in a state whose motto is "Live Free or Die."

Or why Sen. Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat, could yet have cause to wonder why he told Iowans that they could decide who wins the party's nomination and the White House in 2008.

"The people of New Hampshire pay attention to Iowa, but it's not the determining factor," Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona observed recently.

That's a diplomatic way of saying New Hampshire primary voters see little merit in rubber-stamping decisions made in Iowa.

Truth be told, they specialize in humbling the mighty.

Think 2000, when George W. Bush roared out of Iowa, only to lose New Hampshire by a whopping 19 percentage points to McCain.

Only twice since 1976 has the same Democrat won both Iowa and New Hampshire in a contested nominating campaign. And for all the boasting that Granite-Staters do about picking presidents, both Al Gore and John Kerry went on to lose the general election.

This year will test whether Massachusetts Republicans fare as well as Massachusetts Democrats in the primary in the state next door. If so, Mitt Romney will be very pleased, as were Kerry (2004), Paul Tsongas (1992) and Michael Dukakis (1988) before him.

As a group, voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are overwhelmingly white and better educated than the national average.

Still, the differences between them are significant enough to dictate adjustments by the campaigns, even if this year's compressed timetable provides only a five-day interval for changes.

In a recent poll by The Associated Press and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Democrats in both states picked the Iraq war as the top issue in the race.

But in New Hampshire, they care somewhat less about health care as an issue than Iowans, and more about the economy. Not surprisingly, they were also less apt to say that jobs are plentiful locally.

New Hampshire Democrats are more likely to be in union households and far less likely to attend church regularly than their brethren half a continent away.

"Iowa Democrats are more liberal," says Stephanie Cutter, who worked for Kerry in both states in 2004. "In New Hampshire, they're not more moderate, they're more libertarian, it seems."

Overall, New Hampshire is more independent-heavy than Iowa. At about 40 percent of the electorate or so, they outnumber registered Republicans and Democrats. They are free to vote in either party's race, a fact that complicates any pre-primary predictions.

New Hampshire Republicans are more moderate politically than those in Iowa, likelier to support gay marriage, abortion rights and stricter environmental laws.

Among Iowa Republicans, white evangelical Protestants account for an estimated 38 percent of the population of caucus-goers. In New Hampshire, it drops to about 18 percent, according to the Pew survey. In theory, that will make it more difficult for Huckabee to match the strong showing that pre-caucus polls suggest he will have in Iowa.

Then, too, expect less praise for President Bush from Republicans vying to succeed him. Thirty-five percent of New Hampshire GOP voters disapprove of the job he is doing, nearly double the dissatisfaction rate among Iowa Republicans.

For all of New Hampshire's charms, a corn crop is not one of them. In fact, 84 percent of the state is forested, while 88 percent of Iowa is farmland.

That makes federal support for ethanol a nonentity as a political issue in New Hampshire. It's unlikely anyone is happier about that than McCain, who opposes federal subsidies.

Instead, if there is a single issue that has traditionally dominated the state's politics, it is taxes. New Hampshire is one of only two states (Alaska is the other) with neither an income nor a sales tax, and even Democrats running for statewide office suggest one at their peril.

"There's certainly a different focus, more so on fiscal issues, and a libertarian streak in New Hampshire. But I don't see a huge difference between New Hampshire and Iowa voters," Huckabee said recently.

Even the method for sorting out the candidates is different.

New Hampshire has a straight-forward, daylong secret ballot election on Jan. 8 in which voters go to the polls at a time of their choosing.

Iowa's caucuses on Jan. 3 are essentially neighborhood political meetings, all starting at 8 p.m. EST and each requiring voters to publicly declare their presidential preference.

Which New Hampshire is free to ignore.

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