A race reshuffled

New Hampshire voters are famously independent. But as all eyes turn to their Democratic presidential primary next Tuesday, analysts believe John Kerry's stunning victory in far-from- home Iowa could have a powerful impact in the Granite State.

If there's one thing that unites Democrats, it's their intense desire to defeat President Bush. John Kerry, a fourth-term US senator from Massachusetts, has now passed that first test of "electability." He has won a hard-fought political race. That "winner" label, above all else, is likely to earn Senator Kerry a fresh look from a volatile electorate. Polls show that nearly half the Democratic electorate in New Hampshire remains either undecided or willing to switch candidates.

"There's nothing like winning to show people you're a winner," says Dick Bennett, head of American Research Group, a nonpartisan polling firm based in New Hampshire. "That's why Iowa was crucial for [Howard] Dean. He had to win Iowa. He's got to win New Hampshire big, because after that he runs out of gas."

Mr. Kerry and John Edwards, the North Carolina senator who also finished Iowa strong, winning a solid second place (32 percent of delegates to Kerry's 38 percent), benefited foremost from the spectacular decline of Mr. Dean, the former Vermont governor.

No one is counting Dean out yet. But if he does flame out as a candidate, after surging last spring with his fiery antiwar rhetoric, history will show that Dean largely defeated himself. His misstatements and gaffes, and the close scrutiny of his record in Vermont (aided, to be sure, by the press and his political opponents), revealed a candidate who many voters ultimately worried would not wear well in a tough general election battle against President Bush.

Even as recently as Monday night, Dean was probably not winning any new converts with his primal-scream concession speech in Iowa. To his supporters, his performance may have represented the kind of exuberance that won them to his side in the first place.

But to others, including some interviewed in New Hampshire Tuesday morning, it confirmed an image that is at times unpresidential. "I was in a state of shock," says Freda Smith from Salem, N.H., a John Kerry supporter. "He was yelling and screaming on that stage. He almost sounded incoherent."

Analysts note that even before the Iowa caucuses, Dean was starting to slip in New Hampshire, losing support to Kerry and Wesley Clark, the retired general who entered the race late and decided to skip Iowa. In the American Research Group polls, Dean has slipped in New Hampshire from 45 percent in December to 35 percent in early January to 27-28 percent for the past week.

Andy Smith, a pollster at the University of New Hampshire, doesn't think the Iowa result will have much impact in New Hampshire.

"It's not like Iowa is causing that [Dean decline] to happen here," he says, ascribing the shifting numbers to the more moderate and conservative independents making up their minds. But clues on voter decisionmaking will be forthcoming daily, as tracking polls between provide a gauge of how voters are feeling.

The morning after Iowa, many questions remain:

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