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"Scam" ads the norm Trail Mix: Hillary haters spam cyberspace Gunning for the center Democrats make Hillary legit The blundering pundit Don Giuliani Campaign video: |
McCain wins big
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Feb. 2, 2000 |
Salter read his boss the exit poll numbers -- numbers that had McCain with 52 percent of the New Hampshire primary vote and his opponent, national front-runner George W. Bush, with 28 percent. It was a thrashing. McCain took a moment, as Salter and Weaver later recounted. "Gee," he finally said. "That has to have implications, doesn't it?"
"Gee," Salter said, smiling. "You might be president. That might be one of them." McCain turned to Weaver. "A fine mess you've gotten me into this time, Weaver," he deadpanned. The numbers then narrowed a tad, of course -- McCain had 49 percent and Bush 31 percent; Steve Forbes snared 14 percent; Alan Keyes got 6 percent and Gary Bauer barely had any. But McCain had been out-spent and out-endorsed and he came from behind in a way that his friend former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., says he's "never seen before." One GOP state poll from last year had Bush with 61 percent and McCain with 3 percent. Any McCain win here would have been impressive; an 18-point margin will be seen by many as a resounding refutation of the intended coronation of Bush, perhaps the Frank Sinatra Jr. of American politics. Folks at Bush headquarters were, indeed, stunned by the magnitude of McCain's win. All weekend, tracking polls had the candidates running neck and neck. With so much riding on the 40 percent of the state registered as independent, no one knew what was actually going to go down. Indeed, at McCain's polling firm -- Public Opinion Strategies of Alexandria, Va. -- one staffer was derided for her naiveté when she picked McCain to win by 15 points in the office pool. "But that's what our tracking polls say!" Elizabeth Harrington told her jeering office mates. Harrington is now a little richer. Chief pollster Bill McInturff attributes his client's win to the fact that so-called undecided voters were clearly McCain voters; they just were keeping their minds open until they actually pulled the lever. As of Sunday night, McCain was showing 90 percent approval ratings among undecided voters, with 60 percent saying they strongly approve. But it wasn't just independents who voted for McCain, McInturff emphasized. McCain won every single GOP demographic group with the exception of members of the religious right. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers both went for McCain. Young and old, independent and Republican, men and women went for McCain. Bush and McCain had been involved in a heated debate about whether to devote the budget surplus to a sizable tax cut, as Bush proposed, or whether to use the money to shore up Social Security and pay down the national debt, as is McCain's plan. According to McInturff, McCain lost those who favored the tax cut by 6 percentage points, while he won those who favored his plan by an astounding 44 percentage points. Additionally, thousands of previously self-disenfranchised voters who were able to register and vote in the same one-stop-shopping trip did so, and did so for McCain by a proportion of more than 3-to-1. The Bush camp immediately tried to soft-pedal the win, rightly pointing out that they're running in more states and McCain has a lot of catching up to do for Tuesday night's victory to have further ramifications. In his concession speech, Bush pointed out that McCain had "spent more time in this great state than all of the other candidates combined." "Tonight is his night and the night of his supporters and we congratulate him," Bush said. Then he congratulated those who had worked on the Bush team. In McCain's hotel suite, among the campaign inner sanctum, Rudman laughed. "If I were him, I wouldn't be congratulating my team, I'd be firing them," he said. In his acceptance speech, McCain used his brief national spotlight to both repeat his message of reform and rattle his conservative saber. Naysayers said that his message of campaign-finance reform had no room in the Republican Party. "We made room," McCain said, "we made room. And we sent a powerful message to Washington that change is coming. This is a good thing, my friends. Today the Republican Party has recovered its heritage of reform ... And it is the beginning of the end of the truth-twisting politics of Bill Clinton and Al Gore." Now, of course, comes the hard part. "We're in the war now," said McCain's impish spinmeister Mike Murphy. He and McCain's staff said they knew how tough it was going to get in the coming days, but they were well-prepared for it. "We have a great staff, and a great message," said Salter. "But the key is that McCain is the hardest working man in show biz." Added McCain's younger brother, Joe McCain, "What they don't understand is John McCain doesn't quit and John McCain doesn't quit like nobody else doesn't quit." But as McCain's primary victory celebration cranked into high gear, and the maverick Republican's voters and staffers and well-wishers were drinking and smiling ear-to-ear, McCain's senior strategists were girding themselves for some major duty party-crashers. McCain's trouncing of Bush -- by the largest margin of victory in a contested New Hampshire primary since Ronald Reagan Bush-slapped W.'s father in 1980 -- only means a tougher battle yet to come.
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