Democratic Contenders Wage Running Battle on Primary Eve

Fighting exhaustion and knowing New Hampshire’s penchant for political surprises, the Democratic presidential hopefuls traded jabs Monday as they made a final, headlong push for votes in today’s crucial primary.

Whatever the results, the presidential race will undergo a dramatic transformation after tonight. On Wednesday, the race expands into a national campaign, starting with a string of contests on Feb. 3 stretching from Arizona to South Carolina.

That will mean strategizing on the fly -- literally -- for candidates and their advisors, who will likely spend as much time skipping from tarmac to tarmac as they will actually meeting voters.

In New Hampshire and Iowa, John F. Kerry “shook every hand, sought out every undecided voter, stayed and answered every question until the audiences didn’t have anymore,” said Michael Meehan, a senior aide to the Massachusetts senator.

But come Wednesday, Meehan continued, “You’ve got seven states [voting next Tuesday]. You can’t just pick one state and stay there until every last undecided voter has decided. There’s just not the time.”

Even before tonight’s results are in, some candidates will already have left New Hampshire, their sights set on capturing votes -- and delegates -- elsewhere across the country.

The last-minute exchanges here Monday marked a shift in the mostly positive tone of the New Hampshire race, which featured none of the attack advertising that seemed to backfire in Iowa.

Kerry, the leader in opinion polls, abandoned his frontrunner’s perch long enough to take a shot at his rivals on abortion. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, convinced he was bouncing back from his third-place Iowa finish, questioned Kerry’s judgment on foreign policy and spoke of unspecified “dirty tricks.”

Even Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who has shunned most negative campaigning, compared his relatively short time in Washington to Kerry’s decades on Capitol Hill.

“If we want real change in America, it’s my belief that we need someone who’s not a Washington insider,” Edwards told reporters in Portsmouth, on New Hampshire’s picturesque Seacoast.Few were trusting in polls Monday, given the notorious unpredictability of New Hampshire voters and the state’s unusual registration system, which essentially permits anyone who wishes to take part in today’s Democratic primary to do so.

The biggest uncertainty was the state’s big bloc of political independents, who have played a decisive role in past New Hampshire primaries, including the Republican contest in 2000 when Sen. John McCain of Arizona routed then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

“As much as a third of the New Hampshire vote tends to be independents,” said Donnie Fowler, who helped run ground operations in the state in 2000 for then-Vice President Al Gore. “If you look at the history of New Hampshire, on both the Democratic and Republican sides, it’s usually those independents who provide the surprises.”

Kerry and Dean, in particular, have been seeking support from women voters and the back and forth over abortion seemed an effort to bolster their credentials with that important constituency.

“I’m the only candidate running for president who hasn’t played games, fudged around,” Kerry said Monday. “If you believe that choice is a constitutional right, and I do, and if you believe that Roe vs. Wade is the embodiment of that right ... I will not appoint a justice to the Supreme Court of the United States who will undo that right.”

In response, Dean noted that he once sat on the board of Planned Parenthood in northern New England.

“Senator Kerry just last spring couldn’t give a straight answer on where he was on parental notification,” Dean said in an interview with New England Cable News. “He appeared to support it in the Boston Globe and then he came up and denied he supported it in New Hampshire. So I think Senator Kerry has a bit of explaining to do on his position on abortion rights.”

The question of “dirty tricks” arose when an undecided voter asked Dean how he would fend off Republican hijinks if nominated.

“Unfortunately, we are seeing a few of those tricks in the Democratic primary ... ,” Dean said.

A spokesman later said Dean was referring to anonymous phone callers who, among other things, are telling voters the former governor claimed to be a Christian when his wife and children are Jewish. Also, the spokesman said, phony faxes and e-mails were circulating that distorted Dean’s record as governor. While most polls gave Kerry a comfortable lead over the second-place Dean, they also showed a hard-fought race for third place between Edwards, retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

The order of finish will likely prove crucial as the presidential race changes overnight, from the close-quarter scuffling of New Hampshire to the battle reaching nearly coast to coast. The compact, rapid-fire nature of the presidential contest reflects a trend of the past 20 years in which states have scheduled their primaries and caucuses increasingly early to boost their influence. As a result, a nominating process that used to last until June will very likely be wrapped up by mid-March, when just about three-quarters of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention will be awarded.

Given its far-flung nature, the presidential race will require an abundance of two precious commodities: money and momentum.

Of the top contenders, Kerry, Dean, Edwards and Clark all vouch to having the cash needed to compete at least through the next week.

No candidate, however, will have nearly enough money to pay for the kind of wall-to-wall advertising that blitzed TV viewers in Iowa and New Hampshire, or bury them in the campaign literature that stuffed mailboxes in those states.

Strategists confessed to being stumped about how the dynamic will shift after today’s primary. Obviously, a good deal will depend on which candidates are still viable.

“It’s an airport-to-airport race. Little local flavor. No big field organizations. Television ads spotty,” said Paul Maslin, polltaker for the Dean campaign.

“That might benefit the frontrunner by making it harder for people to really narrow their fire on him. Or ... it may be harder for one person to dominate and keep the surge going, which could allow other candidates to emerge.”

One thing is certain: the need to start accumulating delegates for the July convention in Boston, where Democrats formally select the party’s nominee. On Feb. 3, 269 delegates will be at stake, just over a 10th the number needed to win the nomination.

The day’s biggest prize will be Missouri, which has the most delegates at stake and has become wide open with the exit of home-state hopeful Rep. Dick Gephardt.

As the new national frontrunner, Kerry has perhaps moved the most aggressively to compete in the state, hiring a longtime Gephardt aide, Steve Elmendorf, to boost his efforts and scheduling his first post-New Hampshire appearance Wednesday in St. Louis.

The South Carolina primary will be the first in the South and the first to attract a substantial black turnout. Arizona and New Mexico will be the first contests with a significant Latino vote and the first states with no candidate having a regional advantage.

With so many contests coming so quickly, the candidates are banking on a strong New Hampshire showing to build the steam they’ll need then.

On Wednesday, Clark was scheduled to be in South Carolina, Edwards and Kucinich in Oklahoma, Kerry in Missouri and South Carolina, and Lieberman in Delaware. Dean planned to take a day off at home in Vermont.

Beyond that, however, itineraries were extremely uncertain. “Tell me who’s still in the race Wednesday,” said Meehan of the Kerry campaign, “and I’ll tell you where we go.”

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Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.