atch a New Hampshire wave, and you're sitting on top of the world.
That's the position John McCain enjoys coming off his astonishingly large win over George W. Bush Tuesday, for a victory in the nation's first presidential primary can transform a candidate from dark horse to national force almost overnight.
But if history proves the benefit of a so-called New Hampshire ''bounce,'' it also tells a cautionary tale about those who caught, but couldn't ride, the political tsunami triggered there.
Although the state likes to boast that only one man, Bill Clinton, has won the presidency without first winning the New Hampshire primary, plenty of others have won that contest without ever going on to claim even their party's nomination.
Still, under the right conditions, this primary can boost an underfinanced insurgent into a storied realm of resources, recruits, receptivity, and resonance.
''Millions of people don't start paying attention until New Hampshire,'' says Emmett Buell Jr., a professor of political science at Denison University who has analyzed the New Hampshire effect in past campaigns. ''If you have an upset win in New Hampshire by a big magnitude, it is attended by so much vast publicity that that wave is going to travel a long way.''
One effect is that money suddenly starts pouring in, says Nelson W. Polsby, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-editor of the book ''Media and Momentum: The New Hampshire Primary and Nomination Politics.'' A second is that the media suddenly frames the contest in a way much more favorable to the victor.
All that makes for alchemy that can change an underdog's single-state effort into a bona fide national campaign with solid prospects for the nomination.
Arizona Senator McCain will need to benefit from such a transmutation if he's to beat Texas Governor Bush in South Carolina on Feb. 19, and again in Arizona and Michigan the following week, crucial steppingstones to the explosion of primaries on March 7. Indications are that it's starting to happen: McCain raised $1 million in the two days following New Hampshire and new polls now show him essentially tied with Bush in crucial South Carolina.
One can see the transformative effect in past campaigns by comparing a winner's standing in national polls before and after New Hampshire. Start with the astounding events of 1964, when Henry Cabot Lodge, then US ambassador to Vietnam, benefited from a seemingly quixotic write-in candidacy engineered by a quartet of Massachusetts political novices out on a merry lark.
Before the New Hampshire results, Lodge, who was neither a declared candidate nor even in the country, had scored 12 percent in a Gallup Poll to 20 percent for Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. But when Lodge finished first with 36 percent of the Republican primary vote, his political stock soared.
Gallup's next national survey showed Lodge at 42 percent, while Goldwater had dropped to 14 percent.
Before New Hampshire, Lodge couldn't even be called a dark horse, says David Goldberg, one of the four who organized the Lodge effort. ''He went from no horse to front-runner, and the amazing thing is that he was never a candidate.''
For another huge bounce, fast-forward 20 years. In 1984, when Colorado Senator Gary Hart ran in a field that included Walter Mondale, he was hardly a blip in the polls, while the former vice president was a prohibitive front-runner supported by the Democratic Party establishment.
In early February, Gallup had Hart at 3 percent, while Mondale was the choice of 49 percent of Democrats. But once his distant second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses put Hart on the launching pad, New Hampshire rocketed him into national orbit. One week after Hart beat Mondale 37 percent to 28 in the Granite State, the challenger had risen 27 points, to clock in at 30 percent in Gallup's next poll, while Mondale was at 33 percent, a drop of 16 points.
''It gave our candidacy an enormous lift,'' recalls Gerry D'Amico, a Massachusetts state senator then and a member of Hart's inner circle. ''He had front-page stories in all the major papers. He really was hot as a pistol for those first few months.''
In 1992, Paul Tsongas, out of the US Senate for seven years and little known, also found the stir he made in New Hampshire reaped him a national whirlwind.
A national poll two weeks before the primary put Tsongas at only 5 percent, while Bill Clinton was at 45 percent. But when scandal and controversy hobbled Clinton, Tsongas surged from behind to beat him, 33 percent to 24. And suddenly the unlikely candidate from Massachusetts had become a bona fide national sensation. Gallup's next survey put Tsongas at 31 percent to Clinton's 36 percent.
''It made a huge difference,'' said Dennis Kanin, who managed Tsongas's campaign. After New Hampshire, ''We got as much money in one day as we had in several months in 1991. And Tsongas became the counter to Clinton, whereas Bob Kerrey had been.''
The most recent bounce beneficiary has been conservative commentator and columnist Pat Buchanan, running as a Republican in 1996. Less than three weeks before the New Hampshire primary, Gallup had Buchanan at 7 percent, and Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader and GOP front-runner, at 47 percent.
But after New Hampshire handed the conservative insurgent a 37 to 26 percent victory, the next Gallup poll showed Buchanan at 27 percent to Dole's 41.
Now, one need not be too keen a student of political history to note that none of those New Hampshire victors gave the acceptance speech at their party conventions later that summer.
In Lodge's case, he never did campaign for the nomination. Nelson Rockefeller, an active candidate, ended the Lodge boom by beating him in Oregon, using the slogan ''He Cares Enough to Come'' to considerable effect against the absent ambassador. Goldwater eventually won the nomination.
More often, campaign-trail jounce follows Granite State bounce. Sometimes a lesser-known contender finds his victory has landed him astride a runaway horse that eventually throws him. Often, the insurgent's limited campaign infrastructure simply isn't up to coping with the chaotic demands of a national campaign. Or with the sudden scrutiny a New Hampshire victory brings. ''The victor is often not ready for the victory, and when it falls in his lap, it crushes him,'' says Buell.
Hart's inexperienced campaign simply couldn't overcome the institutional advantages Mondale enjoyed as a former vice president and longtime party stalwart. Tsongas's overextended effort collapsed when the campaign moved south and Dixie rescued Clinton, the regional favorite. As for Buchanan, he made the odd decision to hoist a rifle and turn sharply right after New Hampshire, rather than trying to broaden his appeal.
But those failures notwithstanding, what a New Hampshire win imparts is a real chance for an underdog to take his challenge national against the party front-runner. As D'Amico puts it: ''The guys who are the insurgents get one or two shots at taking down the front-runners, but after awhile it becomes a matter of organization and resources.''
And other candidates have been able to parlay a defining New Hampshire moment into momentum they sustained all the way to the nomination. One was Jimmy Carter, whose 1976 campaign pitted him, in one primary or the other, against such initially better-known candidates as Henry Jackson, Mo Udall, Birch Bayh, Frank Church, Jerry Brown, and George Wallace.
A month before New Hampshire, Carter stood at 4 percent nationally to, for instance, Wallace's 20 percent. But in New Hampshire, Carter scored 29 percent of the vote, outpacing his nearest rival, Udall, by 6 percent. In the days following, Carter's national standing rose to 16 percent, establishing him as the front-runner, a position he never relinquished, despite a number of primary losses.
So what does it all mean for McCain, whose 48 to 30 percent victory over Bush in New Hampshire stunned almost everyone?
''He will get a big wave of attention,'' says William Mayer, a political science professor at Northeastern and editor of ''In Pursuit of the White House 2000,'' a book about the nominating process.
''It wouldn't surprise me if he ends up on the cover of Time and Newsweek. It really opens up new possibilities - but for the effect to linger, he has to sustain it in the very next round of primaries.''
