Net Results

CQ Politics senior reporter Greg Giroux provides the following reminder of some of the key differences between last Thursday's Iowa caucuses and Tuesday's New Hampshire primary -- and why the latter could produce a different result (at least on the Republican side):

1. New Hampshire has a primary, not a caucus-voting event. The Iowa caucuses were essentially meetings of party activists to name their presidential candidate preferences and conduct more mundane party business. The New Hampshire primary will be carried out more like a general election, with voters heading to polling stations to cast ballots in private booths. A primary attracts a larger share of a state's registered voters than does a caucus, in part because the latter takes much more of a time commitment and tends to attract party insiders and activists.

2. Independents' Day: Self-described independents -- who are allowed by state law to participate in either the Democratic or Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire -- will comprise a larger share of the vote in that state than in the Iowa caucuses, which have long been dominated by active members of the Democratic and Republican parties. According to exit polls of the 2000 Democratic and Republican primaries in New Hampshire, about 40 percent of voters described themselves as independents. This helped Arizona Sen. John McCain, who ran that year as a "maverick" Republican, score a stunning upset over Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the choice of the national Republican Party establishment (who rebounded after New Hampshire to win the GOP nomination and the general election). McCain is running again this year and once more is staging a serious bid to win in New Hampshire, where he is expected to do better among independents on Tuesday than his chief competitor, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. But one of the biggest worries for the McCain camp is the potential appeal to independents of a leading Democratic candidate, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who is running on the theme of political change. In 2000, neither Vice President Al Gore nor former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley - the contenders for the Democratic nomination - had special appeal to New Hampshire's independents, giving McCain plenty of latitude to court that constituency.

3. New Hampshire is much wealthier overall than Iowa. According to a 2006 Census Bureau survey, New Hampshire's median household income was $59,683, the sixth-highest in the nation and well above the $44,491 median household income for Iowa, which ranked 34th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. (The median household income for the United States in 2006 was $48,451.) Obama did particularly well among Iowa Democratic caucus attendees who reported higher incomes.

4. This relates to the third point, but New Hampshire residents as a whole have higher levels of formal education than Iowa residents. Well-educated New Hampshirites abound along the state's border with Massachusetts - from which a number of them moved in recent years -- and in academic communities such as Hanover, home to Dartmouth College in the western part of the state, and the University of New Hampshire in Durham, which is located in the southeastern part of the state. If the patterns from Iowa hold, these elite communities should favor Obama, who prospered among well-educated Iowa caucus-goers, while voters with less formal education in New Hampshire are more likely to back either New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton or former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

5. "Religious right" voters - an important Republican constituency nationally -- carry less sway in New Hampshire than they do in Iowa. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a social conservative and former Southern Baptist preacher, was propelled to victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses by overwhelming support among self-described evangelical voters, who comprised three of five voters in that contest and who backed Huckabee by 46 percent to 19 percent over Romney. The percentage of New Hampshire primary voters who are evangelicals is much lower, which explains why Huckabee will likely finish no better than third in New Hampshire, behind front-runners McCain and Romney. In the 2000 Republican primary, just 20 percent of voters described themselves as "born again" or evangelical: McCain ran even with Bush among this subset and dominated Bush among voters who said they were not born-again or evangelicals.