ETROIT - Alan Keyes knew he was traveling toward a political landscape that differed from the one that gave him third place in Iowa's Republican caucuses, but it was not apparent how different until noon yesterday.
With snow and ice enveloping New England, Northwest Airlines Flight 384, carrying Keyes on the second leg of his trip to New Hampshire, was turned back 100 miles short of Boston. The plane returned to Detroit, grounding the candidate along with hundreds of other East Coast-bound passengers for the afternoon.
In an interview aboard the plane, Keyes said he had no concern about confronting a New Hampshire electorate that is not as driven by the passions of the abortion issue as the voters in Iowa.
''It is still a conservative constituency,'' he said of New Hampshire. ''They are interested in taxes, and the Second Amendment, but the moral crisis is the issue. And if they look at every Republican candidate in terms of moral values, they'll see that I am the one who most effectively articulates these concerns.''
Nevertheless, as the Republican race moves halfway across the country, the three candidates who made their opposition to abortion the centerpiece of their campaigns in Iowa - Keyes, Steve Forbes, and Gary Bauer - will face new dynamics in New Hampshire.
Claremont, N.H., does not have the same priorities as Colfax, Iowa, and the New Hampshire seacoast towns will never be confused with the river ports of Dubuque and Davenport. New Hampshire has been roiled by issues such as taxes and gun control and nuclear power, but rarely by abortion, a topic that is believed to be paramount in the minds of 40 percent of the Republican caucus voters in Iowa.
Campaigning at the grave of an abandoned fetus in Des Moines on Saturday, Bauer was asked if abortion would be an issue in New Hampshire. ''If I have anything to do with it, it will,'' he vowed.
But Bauer, one of the veteran voices of the antiabortion movement, finished a weak fourth in Iowa, and New Hampshire looks like unfavorable terrain for him to resuscitate his campaign.
As the caucus results flowed into a Republican center in Des Moines Monday night, Forbes' aides were elated over the returns from the Christian conservative counties the publisher had cultivated for the past year.
In Woodbury County, which includes Sioux City, a conservative fortress, Forbes led Governor George W. Bush by more than 100 votes.
All but abandoning the flat-tax theme he carried in 1996, Forbes pitched his campaign again on abortion. As he traveled the rural Iowa towns in the last week, Forbes pounded on the issue in the company of another well-known antiabortion crusader, Phyllis Schlafly.
Schlafly was not with Forbes in New Hampshire yesterday. The candidate's spokesman, K. B. Forbes, said in a phone interview that he did not know if Schlafly would appear in the state, but he said abortion ''will be part of our overall message'' in the coming days.
Keyes was skeptical about Forbes' use of the issue. ''His commitment to prolife is strictly political,'' Keyes said yesterday. ''We'll see what he does when he's not under the moral pressure'' of the Iowa conservatives.
Keyes, who calls the acceptance of abortion the most destructive element in America, was able to mobilize a unique following in Iowa. Keyes, a black man and a communicant of the Catholic Church, was supported by a constituency that barely exists in New Hampshire: white working-class Protestants who hew to a fundamentalist faith.
At an election eve rally in West Des Moines, members of the audience offered evangelical prayers and expressed disgust at a moral decline they see at the White House.
After his admirers boosted Keyes into third place in Iowa, he said he would have new credibility in New Hampshire. ''It will excite people who have been saying: `I like you, but I don't think you can win.'''
Keyes said it would be difficult to use issues such as tax-cut proposals and trade to run against the Democrats in times of economic prosperity. But President Clinton, he said, represents ''the moral crisis in this country.'' Once he makes it to New Hampshire, Keyes promised, he would continue his moral campaign.
