ASHUA - Everyone knows presidential politics can be dirty. But campaigns here now have a new weapon: Antibacterial lotion, which candidates slather on after shaking dozens of hands after each event to prevent the spread of germs and to ward off colds.
The lotion is one of many ways modern science and technology have crept into the primary process, making it more immediate, more complicated, more portable, more effective and, many believe, less forgiving and personal, than in the days when it was captured in black and white.
Campaign staff can now deliver news flashes by electronic mail, sent from cell-phone-connected laptop computers while the staff ride buses from one stump speech to another.
''It's like triage,'' the New Hampshire GOP chairman, Steve Duprey, said of the hospital emergency room procedure for ordering patient treatment priorities.
Phone canvassing, which was once the chore of volunteers who called neighbors, has been handed to sophisticated dialers who are paid to do the same job.
Some of those electronic voter profiles also contain records of responses to phone survey questions, the voter's ''ZIP-plus-four-digit'' extended ZIP code, and his or her census tract, which can reveal such things as median income.
But there's not as much calling as there used to be, because voters are more targeted. The callers cull names and numbers from layered databases - complete with an individual's voting pattern and a note on whether the person supports the candidate - rather than from dog-eared index cards stuffed in shoe boxes, as was the case not so long ago.
Don Knight, 49, an i ndependent from Litchfield, said he has received few calls so far, and fewer campaign visits to his house.
''The door-to-door requires a lot of time,'' the electric contractor said. ''It's a lot easier to collect a database and send e-mails.''
Even those old-fashioned mailings, though they still occur, have become more focused, because of profiling.
But, Knight said, it's e-mail addresses that campaigns want, because they allow for faster and cheaper delivery of information than do the extended ZIP codes. That, and the falling price of satellite TV time, may be the only ways in which campaigning is getting less expensive.
Still, there is a price to pay for all this technology, according to Will Abbott, who was political director for former President George Bush's 1988 campaign in New Hampshire.
''We had 3,000 active volunteers, putting out lawn signs and licking stamps. I don't think that happens anymore,'' Abbott said. ''I think it does change the dynamic of the campaign. In 1988, when Vice President Bush came in third in Iowa's caucuses and needed a real boost in New Hampshire, the field organization wasn't the only thing that won the election for him, but it certainly contributed ... I don't see a lot of that in this campaign.
''Technology,'' he added, ''allows you to circumvent the need to have a lot of people talking to each other on the telephone.''
