Why did Obama lose the New Hampshire Primary?

The Independent Voters

In what many described as a "shocking" or "surprising," Hilary Clinton won last night's New Hampshire Primary. I have to say personally that I was expecting a Barack Obama win just like everyone else. But to examine why he lost, you have to start with the kind of primary election that New Hampshire has.

Some primaries are what is called "closed":basically that only the people who are registered democrats can vote in the democratic primary, only those registered as democrats can vote in the republican primaries, and people registered as independents can't vote at all. You can argue that this is an effective method of preventing sabotage--I am a democrat and my nominee is already decided, so I am going to go out and vote for a republican candidate who has absolutley no chance of winning in a general election so the Democrats will win the election. This is an idea called "raiding."

New Hampshire has what is called a semi-closed primary, meaning that independents can chose which primary they want to vote in, but can't vote in both the republican and democratic primaries. The independent vote basically has to chose which of the primaries is more important to vote in.

This reason is why Mr. Obama lost. Obama won Iowa with a lot of support from independent voters in Iowa. The republican race their wasn't really decided by independents as much. It was the 3 out of every 5 republican primary voters who were evangelicals or born again that decided the vote their.

The republican race in New Hampshire is much different. John McCain is a republican candidate who draws a lot of independent voters, and so is Obama. It appears that McCain got these voters to come out for him: 37% of the voters in the republican primary were independents. All these independents chose to vote for McCain for many reasons, not the least of which is that New Hampshire is in many ways McCain's state.

Among "die-hard" democrats, Obama is actually less popular than Hillary Clinton. This seems rather counter-intuitive, but consider Obama's main message: he wants to unite america, and end the partisan divide etc. These are very strong messages that resonate with a lot of Americans, but not democrats. Why? Well it's because many democrats see this election as their chance to beat the republicans at their own game. They finally have a political climate where more people plan to vote for a democrat than a republican in the Presidential election. To many, this isn't the time to end partisanship, but rather the time to finally get it to work to their advantage. They want to beat the republicans, not compromise with them.

So if we accept that Obama's message doesn't play as well to die-hard democrats, then why did so many of the independent voters choose to vote for McCain? It's because of Iowa : Obama's boost in the polls (All polls include likely voters, but does that mean they will vote in a specific primary?) gave him a 13 point lead in the latest Gallup poll. He was considered in many ways to be a sure thing--Why would we have to vote for him, he is already going to beat the crap out of Hilary. We might as well help out McCain, whose lead in the same Gallup poll was only 4 points. The Independent voters thought Obama was a sure thing, and that everybody else was already voting for him, so they didn't really need to vote for him.

In the end, its not as much that Hillary Clinton won this primary election, or that Obama lost. It is