N.H. battle is on shifting ground

MANCHESTER, N.H. — This is not your father's New Hampshire, as presidential candidates of both parties are about to learn Tuesday.

Twenty years ago, the downtown area of Manchester, the state's largest city, was a dying collection of worn storefronts. Now, there are popular nightspots, a new arena and a minor-league baseball team. The once-dilapidated old textile mills lining the Merrimack River now house high-tech companies, a college and expensive restaurants.

Even the topography has changed: Up north, the Old Man of the Mountain is gone, the great stone face that for nearly 200 years symbolized the state's Yankee stoicism, lost in a 2003 rock slide.

Also gone: the Republican hegemony that long dominated the state's politics. Democrats took control last year of the state's two U.S. House seats — for the first time since 1912 — and the governorship and the state Legislature — for the first time since 1874.

The election was the result of two trends: New Hampshire's rapidly changing demographics, and local distrust of the increasingly conservative national Republican Party.

Both probably will have an impact Tuesday.

"It's changed," said Charles Black, a Republican strategist who first worked on a New Hampshire campaign in 1976, in Ronald Reagan's primary challenge to President Ford. "The base Republican vote used to be around 50 percent, maybe more. Now it's probably 40 percent. Now it's a swing state."

New Hampshire's population grew 95 percent from 1965 to 2006, to more than 1.3 million, and it continues to expand. High-tech and financial-services jobs fuel the boom.

Nearly 25 percent of potential voters didn't live here in 2000, according to a University of New Hampshire study.

Picturesque towns throughout the state churned out old-fashioned Yankee Republicans for generations. But "those people have largely died off," replaced by retirees and educated white-collar workers who "move here and bring their politics with them," said Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political scientist.

From 2002 to 2007, Democrats registered 45,000 new voters; Republicans registered 2,800.

At the same time, traditional Republican voters generally are at odds with the national Republican Party. In a state whose motto is "Live Free or Die," in-your-face social conservatism never has had much appeal. That helps explain why former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee languishes in polls.

Additionally, the face of the state's Democratic Party has changed. Once an ethnic, blue-collar, heavily Roman Catholic party focused on the old mill towns of Manchester and Nashua, it's become a more secular, socially liberal party.

Still, Democrats don't have a stranglehold on the state's politics. The most influential voters are independents. Those who register "undeclared" — 44 percent of voters — can participate in either primary.

Independents gave Sen. John McCain a resounding victory over George W. Bush in 2000, as the two basically split the registered Republican vote.

This year, polls indicate that those independent voters are inclined to vote in the Democratic primary, largely because of frustration with the Iraq war.

One thing about New Hampshire hasn't changed: its legendary unpredictability. More than half of voters make up their minds in the last week before their primary, according to exit polls. They sent a message to Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and to George H.W. Bush in 1992 by giving substantial minorities to challengers Eugene McCarthy and Pat Buchanan. They rejected "front-runners" Walter Mondale in 1984 and Bush in 2000, favoring insurgents Gary Hart and McCain.

"Hillary Clinton has really established herself in a very large way in New Hampshire," said George Bruno, a former New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman. "A powerful staff, ample money, gets a lot of airtime, has by all accounts a very good organization. That said, others have been in her position and at the last minute, the ground shifted."