Anyone with a pulse knows that New Hampshire had their Republican and Democratic primaries yesterday (yes, there was a Democratic primary, despite the news coverage amounting to zilch). As expected, Mitt Romney won the Republican primary, with Ron Paul coming in second and John Huntsman taking third. The only mild surprise there is John Huntsman, who is hoping to leverage this into more face time on the news. Will he be the next candidate experiencing a media bump (and comensurate rise in the polls)? Not likely - considering SC is next.

These first three contests take a fairly good snapshot of three diverse areas of the country - the Midwest, New England, and Deep South. Assuming no candidates drop out, they will likely be microcosms of the voting that will occur in other states in their regions (the Rocky Mountain states and west coast are another story, yet to be written). Those with a social conservative agenda (ie: Santorum) will do well in the Deep South.

Romney does have momentum going into the SC race, though, and there is a certain subset of voters that aren't really committed, and will vote for the candidate they think will win, because they want to vote for a winner (so they can lay claim to some sort of political savvy later on). Romney's two early wins are a huge boost to his campaign. I will make the prediction that he will not win SC, but he may do better than he would have otherwise.

What's far more interesting about yesterday's results are the numbers. Let's compare the results of the 2012 Republican and Democratic results against those from the 2008 race for both the Republicans and Democrats. As of this writing, 95% of the results are in, so the numbers aren't 100% accurate, but I can't imagine them changing drastically:

	2008 votes	2012 votes
Mitt Romney	75,500	95,700
Barack Obama	104,800	45,000
Total Republican	234,800	239,700
Total Democratic	287,500	55,000
Total Voters	527,200	289,300

I find these raw numbers to be fascinating. Compare the 2008 race with the current 2012 race. There was no incumbent... there was a lot of excitement on the Democratic side with a "black" man and a woman as the two front runners. The fields on both sides were still wide open. This year we have an incumbent Democratic president. The Republicans are framing this race as "we must defeat President Obama in 2012 and 'take our country back'".

New Hampshire is an "open primary" state. That means that you do not have to be a registered Republican to vote in the Republican primary. Democrats and "independent" voters can vote in that primary as well. Barack Obama is running essentially unopposed; he got 90% of the vote. Some may point to his huge drop in the vote total as indicative of dissatisfaction among the Democrats, but if that were true, they'd show up and vote for one of his opponents in the primary (and about 10,000 did). Instead, I would argue that they assumed he'd win and didn't feel the need to vote in that primary.

So - considering that independents and Democrats didn't vote in the Democratic primary, one would assume they'd vote in the Republican primary instead. The number of votes in the Republican primary should have increased in some inverse relationship with the number of voters that decreased in the Democratic primary.

Instead, approx 239,000 voters just stayed home this year. Only 5000 more voters voted in the Republican primary.

I don't know how many voters in New Hampshire consider themselves to be independent. Whatever the number, they didn't seem panicked enough by President Obama nor inspired enough by any of the Republican candidates to even show up on election day.

That, I think, speaks volumes.