The Voters' Revenge

By Nancy Gibbs and David Von Drehle

First came the fresh winds across the prairie, Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama rising fast and blowing away row upon row of tidy assumptions and dead certainties. As that front moved east, the weather changed; spring, the season of rebirth, came to New Hampshire. Snowbanks softened, toppling the yard signs; the Ice Queen melted. By nightfall, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, two veterans once left for dead, had sprung back to life.

In a race that turns out to be all about climate change, just about every forecaster was wrong -- which in a way was the best part. People made their own weather, refusing to stay inside, ignoring the old rules, the hot air, the floods of cash. Voters in both contests turned out in record numbers to throw off the polling models, and the fact that no one knows what happens now is itself a cause to celebrate. Maybe the other 99% of citizens will get a chance to play their part too in the already merrily historic campaign of 2008. Political professionals, consultants, lobbyists, reporters and pundits leafed madly through the unread pages of this election saga, but the voters took the book away and closed it. No jumping ahead. The story won't be foretold. It will unfold.

I. The Democrats On Tuesday night, as the results started tight and stayed that way, Obama ate dinner at his Nashua hotel with his wife Michelle and his Kenyan sister Auma -- no kids, no aides. As the night got longer, his would-be victory rally was tomblike. You could hear change drop. Nothing that had happened in the previous 96 hours had prepared either side for what had taken place across New Hampshire since the polls opened at dawn.

Just as the voters of Iowa hadn't wanted to be told that Clinton was the inevitable nominee, Democrats in New Hampshire weren't much in the mood to be told that her candidacy was toast, that their votes were futile. In the final hours, the undecideds, who often end up too torn among candidates or too busy to bother voting, made their way to the polls and carried Clinton to victory. Obama got 37%, just as the polls projected. But the mantra of change that had turned seasoned journalists into giddy ballerinas in the days after Iowa did not win over the supporters of recently departed candidates Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, most of whom cast their ballots for Clinton. She got 40% instead of 30%, and Obama's lead disappeared, her fortunes revived, and both sides now have to plan for a campaign whose only certainty is uncertainty.

People close to Clinton, including one who spent the day in her hotel suite as she and her team worked on her speech, didn't think she saw it coming. But Clinton says otherwise. She went out early that morning to polling places. "I looked at voters, and they looked at me," she said. "I shook their hands, and we saw people just randomly. I stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts and just began to ask people to go out and vote. I began to sense that we were going to do well." She didn't say anything when she got back to the hotel; the first exit polls still had her about 9 points down. "I thought, You know, either I have totally lost my touch for figuring out what voters are thinking and doing, or this is going to be a lot better than anybody thinks."

The projected Obama blowout had the commentariat writing Clinton political obits and big donors so depressed, they were lined up to jump off that bridge to the 21st century. Her events felt flat and forced; the sound system wouldn't work well; the mike screeched back at her. Clinton's crowds each day, impressive by normal standards, could not rival Obama's immense events, so staffers were reduced to moving risers and limiting entry to create the appearance of overflow. Conservative fund raisers, meanwhile, were pondering in emails to one another whether to cut Clinton's name from their direct-mail appeals and paste in Obama's. A G.O.P. operative, after watching both party debates on Saturday night, declared, "Well, it's over now. She doesn't have a chance, and neither do we."

But that was just one more example of people who knew too much not seeing what was right in front of them: that voters might actually want to have a say in a primary system that has been engineered and re-engineered entirely around the interests of special interests. It was far too early for the whole process to be over, not with so many questions still to answer.

Fight or Unite? When Obama talks about change, what he doesn't say is that Democrats have been arguing among themselves for years about how to achieve it in a pitiless political culture -- war or diplomacy, fight or unite? When he talks healing, his crowds go wild; when Clinton talks about fighting, hers do. Her advantage is that the party has its own military-industrial complex: the union bosses and activists and local pols who are well practiced at the art of war and have the scars to show for attempts at compromise. In lining up behind Clinton, they were placing their bets on the likeliest winner, the brand name with the long memory, and the candidate most likely to give their conservative foes apoplectic fits.

New Hampshire was especially Clinton country, full of veterans of battles at her side going back to the day 16 years ago when together they helped breathe life into Bill Clinton's presidential ambitions. All weary and wise, all steeped in the hard work of small steps, they had no time for the airy (they said empty) hope Obama was peddling; it was as if it diminished everything they'd fought for so long, the way he made it sound easy, as though if only we were more polite to one another, all our problems would just sort themselves out.

It's an awfully handy thing for a candidate running on a promise to change the system to show he could actually do it. That, after all, is what Iowa caucuses are for -- little sealed rooms with lots of measuring instruments in them so you can see if your hypotheses hold true. By any standard measure, Clinton's calculations worked: she built the organization, spent the money, put up huge numbers in Iowa. In any other year, it would have been more than enough to win. And Obama, he was supposed to be all style and no substance, the Howard Dean of 2008, whose base was a bunch of college kids who showed up to his rallies but wouldn't make it to the perpetually confusing caucuses.

But a funny thing happened on caucus day. Those college and even high school kids showed up at their precincts; there were three times as many young voters at the caucuses as in 2004, and more than half of them caucused for Obama. In a shock to the Clinton campaign, which had counted on turning out high numbers of women voters, Obama captured more female supporters than his rivals. Both Clinton and John Edwards, who edged past her into second place, played the game by its normal rules and played it exceedingly well. But Obama changed the game. Just as he had promised.

On to New Hampshire So why did a message that worked so well in Iowa and looked to resonate in New Hampshire ultimately fall short? In one sense, it didn't. Obama got his bounce out of Iowa, jumped in the polls and inspired people in the surrounding states to get in their cars and drive for hours to see the candidate whom headline writers started calling the Barack Star. Listening to him speak, a former Clinton supporter had goose bumps, saying "I felt I started seeing something in America I haven't seen in a long time."

In fact, Obama's message was working well enough that Clinton had to react to it. "This has been very much a referendum on her," said strategist Mark Penn on the press plane east from Iowa. During private sessions that spread through the weekend, the internal Clinton campaign discussion alternated between how to hit Obama and how to help her. "You're going to see some very sharp media now," an adviser promised. Aides threw out charges one after another in emails and in conference calls with reporters -- about Obama's vote for the Patriot Act, his relationship with lobbyists, his violation of election rules governing robocalls.

Clinton's strategists realized she was telling voters too much about what she had done for them, while Obama was talking about what he would do for them. Voters don't like being told, You should support me because you owe me. She began taking more questions, which was a chance to unfurl her plans for everything from student loans to mortgage meltdowns. She even changed the stagecraft. At her concession speech in Iowa, the platform behind Clinton was filled by alumni from the class of '92, including her husband and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It had become clear that a Clinton restoration wasn't selling and she needed a new visual. Behind the scenes as well, the casting changed. Maggie Williams, who had been First Lady Hillary Clinton's fiercely loyal chief of staff, and Doug Sosnik, who had been a top aide to Bill Clinton, both prepared to return to the fray post-New Hampshire. "Maggie will make her feel more comfortable. Doug will make him feel more comfortable," said a campaign adviser. "And they've both been through this before."

Clinton's debate performance on Saturday, which the theater critics panned, actually served her well with voters and raised once more whether Democrats are looking for a fighter or a healer. ABC News brought in market researchers who hooked up voters with electrodes to monitor their brain activity. Her flash of anger when the boys ganged up played well with all of them; so did her humor, when she was asked why people don't like her: "Well, that hurts my feelings." But viewers really hated Obama's graceless barb when he told her, "You're likable enough."

Campaign insiders, however, remained pretty sober about her chances. Just about the best they could manage by Monday was to concede that "it is a reasonably long shot, but it is not a fool's errand" for Clinton to continue her campaign past New Hampshire. In a sign of the passing of remote-controlled, big media campaigns, their best hope lay with a ground operation run by a 34-year-old named Nick Clemons, a veteran of former Governor Jeanne Shaheen's operation. "The heart of our ground game was face-to-face contact," he said Wednesday morning, describing a strategy perfected by the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in 2004. "I know that sounds like old ward-style politics, but it really works." The day before the election, Clemons had an army of 4,000 volunteers knocking on 105,000 New Hampshire doors. Early on, Clinton's team had put together a list of 70,000 of her most likely supporters, slicing and dicing the data by every demographic measure of education level, income and gender to figure out who they were looking for. The answer: "It was women ... We knew we had to go after those women and make sure they voted," said Clemons. Those deemed least likely to make it to the polls got three visits over the final weekend.

Team Clinton even had a worst-case scenario in the event that results out of Iowa weren't all they might hope for. Organizers focused on getting absentee ballots into the hands of seniors, Boston commuters and students on winter break who might not make it to the polls on election day. In the end it was enough to make the difference.

Obama held his own with the labor vote in Iowa; Clinton got it back in New Hampshire, by 10 points. He won among women in Iowa; they swung over to her by a 13-point margin in New Hampshire, along with blue collar workers, a reflection of the fact that voters' greatest concern in the state was the economy. Round 2 went to Clinton. Now both candidates set their shoulders to head back into the fray. And voters in the other 48 states get ready for their turn.

II. The Republicans Meanwhile, Mitt Romney's plans to shortcut the Republican nomination were based on hard cash, not heartstrings. Instead of challenging his party's old notions, he conformed to them as closely as a loaf of bread conforms to its pan. But he learned in these tumultuous five days that democracy is more than weighing wallets and poll-testing positions, no matter what your consultants might tell you.

Whipped in Iowa by Huckabee -- a former Baptist minister with a parson's demeanor and a cobra's bite -- Romney foundered in New Hampshire on a block of granite named McCain. When the Associated Press called the New Hampshire race shortly after the polls closed, McCain's volunteers screamed for joy, but the candidate's mood was more muted. McCain had spent the previous 24 hours superstitiously re-creating the trappings of his smashing New Hampshire win eight years ago -- sleeping in the same hotel room, wearing the same emerald green sweater and so on. "I guess more nostalgia, you know," he reflected later. "We all know that I would never do this again."

How had the 71-year-old Arizona Senator managed it this time? His story, too, involved catastrophe and reinvention -- and voters responding to a personal message from a candidate and a campaign that wouldn't give in.

He entered the campaign a year ago as the apparent front runner, an awkward role for a free-ranging, fence-jumping, kick-the-corral maverick. McCain never got the hang of it, breaking with his party's mainstream on tax cuts, immigration, harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects -- the list goes on. By July his bank account and his poll numbers were in a race to zero, which turned out to be a blessing.

"The people who mishandled his campaign did him an enormous favor. They blew up a campaign that couldn't win," says an unaffiliated Republican strategist. "They destroyed his bases and mangled his supply lines. They left him only the option of falling back on himself and his instincts to fight a guerrilla-style campaign. And that's the only way he can win." Troops decimated, supply lines smoldering, McCain returned to the campaigning he knows and loves best. "He put this campaign on his back," says Mark Salter, McCain's close aide, co-author and comrade through long hours spent lying in ambush. "He went out there and worked. Obama gets massive rallies, but McCain just wins them one guy at a time."

Returning to the turf where he scalped George W. Bush in 2000, McCain revved up the Straight Talk Express and rode it to more than 100 town-hall meetings. Romney barely knew what hit him. McCain's numbers shot up in the last week before the primary. Says Bernie Streeter, a former mayor of Nashua: "Voters realized that the guy they loved eight years ago was back in the horse race."

"I think principle and persuasion won over money and political messaging," McCain told TIME after his victory.

GOP Soul-Searching Romney should have seen both losses coming. No matter how little money or press Huckabee received, he was tailored from the get-go to appeal to Iowa caucuses. They like down-to-earth, Bible-reading, unflashy dark horses: just ask Jimmy Carter. Huckabee's populism and gift for campaigning made him an irresistible choice for Iowa Republicans, and he brought remarkable numbers of Evangelicals out to vote. And when the crotchety, conservative New Hampshire Union Leader joined the elbow-patch-liberal Concord Monitor in endorsing McCain, Romney was on notice that his mansion on a New Hampshire lakefront wouldn't be enough to stop the state's real favorite transplant.

The will to prognosticate is the dark addiction of the pundit class. No matter how wrong they got Iowa and New Hampshire, Republicans were soon buzzing over phone lines and trading emails about the road ahead. McCain and Huckabee are chasing Romney into Michigan, hoping to land a knockout punch in the state where Romney's father was once governor. Four days past that comes South Carolina, where McCain's 2000 bid was rudely demolished. But there, as everywhere, the political landscape is changed in unpredictable ways. The state's solid G.O.P. machine has fragmented into factions only occasionally willing to cooperate. One belongs to Senator Lindsey Graham, a devoted McCain supporter. Another faction, which includes the much feared strategist Warren Tompkins, is in Romney's camp, while the widow and one son of the late mastermind Carroll Campbell have signed on with Huckabee. As a result, the Palmetto State may not play its customary role: cutting the G.O.P. field down to one with ruthless discipline and efficiency.

"So the race goes on to Florida, and guess who's sitting there like a bug on a stump? Rudy Giuliani," said Mit Spears, a Washington Republican in Romney's camp. Florida's Jan. 29 primary will test the former New York City mayor's unconventional strategy of hanging back until the race reaches the megastates, where his celebrity gives him extra leverage.

For now, the momentum has swung to McCain. Campaign insiders found their phones ringing merrily on Wednesday morning as donors hustled to hop on the latest bandwagon. "We're ready to schedule as many fund raisers in one week as we've had in the rest of the year put together," said Ryan Ballard, a national co-chair of McCain's money team. "I haven't had enough time to answer all the calls I'm getting -- from Romney people, mostly, but even from Giuliani people looking over their shoulders and hedging their bets."

What makes Republican politics into three-dimensional chess is that no candidate seems to measure up to the cherished image of a foursquare Reagan Republican. The party is enduring a dark night of the soul, almost entirely self-inflicted. After the excesses of the recent Republican majority in Congress, the party no longer sees a fiscal conservative in the mirror, while the Bush Administration's chesty foreign policy and churchy personality have driven wedges between conservatives and neoconservatives, between Evangelicals and pragmatists. Trying to find a candidate to rally around is like asking a roomful of picky eaters to agree on a pizza.

What's more, signs of a passion gap emerged in Iowa, where the Democratic caucuses drew twice as many voters as Republican ones. Campaign events often had a very different feel -- Democrats big and brassy and confident; Republican gatherings smaller and more dutiful. It was easy to find voters who said they had decided for Edwards or Obama but had great respect for Clinton and thought she'd make a fine President as well. Many Republican voters talked about a lesser of evils.

But the G.O.P. was practically buoyant compared with the gloom that reigned when Obama roared out of Iowa. Having spent years planning for an epic rematch against the Clintons, their favorite archvillains, Republicans suddenly saw a new and looming foe rumbling the ground as he approached. Obama's lack of political baggage and abundance of star power made the all-too-human qualities of the Republican field more apparent.

Never have so many Republicans been so pleased by Hillary Clinton's success. "Sweet baby Jesus, they saved our bacon," a veteran of the Reagan Administration exulted. "We're back in the game." But that relief may well be short-lived. This is going to last for a while, and in 48 states, voters are getting ready to play.

-- reported by Ana Marie Cox, Michael Scherer, Jay Newton-Small, Amy Sullivan and Karen Tumulty/Iowa and James Carney, Gilbert Cruz, Michael Duffy and Mark Halperin/New Hampshire