THE BALTIMORE SUN: Mitt Romney rolled to an easy victory Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary, taking a broad stride toward capturing the GOP presidential nomination as the contest heads south for a pair of potentially make-or-break contests.
The win, forecast by the television networks from exit polls almost immediately after voting ended, would give Romney a one-two sweep in the early balloting of the 2012 campaign, a first for any Republican apart from a sitting president.
The conservative candidates who stand the best chance to stop him as the race heads to South Carolina – former Pennsylvania Sen.Rick Santorum, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry -- were trailing far back and appeared unlikely to get a significant lift from their performance here.
In polling before Tuesday’s election, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. were vying for second place. Santorum, the Iowa runner-up by a handful of votes, and Gingrich were scrambling to create some sense of momentum for their campaigns. Perry abandoned New Hampshire, staking his future on South Carolina.
Romney starts out leading there, too, but that challenge promises to be much more formidable than New Hampshire which, from the start, was a fight to finish second behind the former Massachusetts governor. Unlike Iowa, where leaders came and went atop the polls, no survey ever showed Romney with less than a sizable, double-digit New Hampshire lead.
In South Carolina, however, Romney won't have what amounted to a home-field advantage -- five Massachusetts presidential hopefuls have won the neighboring Granite State in past elections -- and he will face a much different electorate in the first Southern primary next week.
South Carolina has a large and politically important bloc of evangelical voters. Romney will face resistance among some of those Christian conservatives who are suspicious if not downright hostile toward his Mormon faith. In New Hampshire, just 14% of those who voted Tuesday said being a “true conservative” was the most important thing to them, trailing far behind the economic concerns cited by 6 in 10 voters, according to election day interviews by the TV networks.
Romney is also facing a more assertive pack of runners-up. » | Los Angeles Times Staff Writer | Tuesday, January 10, 2012
THE GUARDIAN: Romney raises $24 million » | AP foreign | Wednesday, January 11, 2012
