Mitt Romney Wins N.H. Primary

UPDATE: With 95 percent of precincts reporting, Mitt Romney with 40 percent, Ron Paul with 23, Jon Huntsman with 17, Newt Gingrich with 10, Rick Santorum with 9 and Rick Perry with 1 percent.

Tuesday, Jan. 10 at 8:29 p.m.: And your New Hampshire winner is ... Mitt Romney.

The Granite State's last polls closed at 8 p.m. and it didn't take long for the networks to call it, thanks to Romney's commanding lead in reported precincts and exit polls. NBC News, Fox News, the Associated Press and plenty of others were quick to declare victory for the former Massachusetts governor.

CNN's exit polls had Romney winning with 36 percent. Ron Paul looks assured of taking second place, beating Jon Huntsman out for the coveted runner-up position, 23 percent to 18 percent, in the exit poll. The early vote count shows a similar story: With 19 percent of the precincts reporting, Paul leads Huntsman 25 percent to 17 percent. Roughly 20 minutes after calling the race for Romney, CNN projected a second-place finish for Paul and a third-place finish for Huntsman.

In an interview shortly before CNN called the mini-race between Paul and Huntsman, the latter told the network that third place would be a strong enough result for him to continue his bid for the GOP nomination. "There are at least three tickets out of New Hampshire," Huntsman said, indicating that he'll next head to South Carolina.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum currently sit in fourth and fifth, with 10 percent each, and Rick Perry, who more or less abandoned the state in favor of getting a head start in South Carolina, is bringing up the rear with 1 percent.

Tuesday, Jan. 10 at 9 a.m.: Voters in New Hampshire have already cast the first ballots in the state's GOP Primary, with most polls in the state currently open.

Mitt Romney, the current front-runner, is widely expected to win the state. Barring a last second change of heart by Granite State voters, the vote is mostly a question of how large a margin of victory he can post in a contest seen largely as a home game for the former Massachusetts governor.

Even though Romney's lead in the polls slipped over the past week, no other candidate managed a major eleventh-hour surge like the one Rick Santorum achieved in Iowa last week. Romney's small fall in the polls is blamed on both the increasingly vicious attacks from his GOP rivals, including the opening up of the Bain Capital box; and on Romney's less-than-stellar responses to said attacks.

Most notoriously, the other candidates now have a sound byte of Romney saying he likes to fire people.

According to Monday's Suffolk University/7 News poll, Romney still has a 13-point lead over any other candidate at 33 percent, but that's down about 10 percentage points from five days ago. Romney is followed by Ron Paul with 20 percent, Jon Huntsman with 13 percent, Newt Gingrich with 11 percent and Santorum with 10 percent. And, as Slate's Dave Weigel notes, even Buddy Roemer is beating Rick Perry in New Hampshire now. 

Gingrich has taken the lead in the Romney attack, but will most likely have to wait until South Carolina to get his revenge. A pro-Newt super PAC with a new $5 million donation has plans for flooding the Palmetto State with Bain-centered attack ads in the lead-up to the state's Jan. 21 primary, NPR reports.

Perry, for his part, has become the troll of the campaign. According to the New York Times, he briefly turned Romney's "I like to fire people" clip into a ringtone.