Mitt Romney enthusiastically predicted a win in the GOP New Hampshire primary Tuesday, looking to beat expectations and polls that have shown rival John McCain edging out Romney in the Granite State.

Having downplayed expectations by discussing second place the day before, on Tuesday Romney was talking about a win and promising to soldier on regardless of the outcome.

“I’m planning on winning today, no guarantees , but I’m planning on winning and I can be pretty sure that by the end of today I will have received more votes for president than any other Republican,” Romney said in Salem.

McCain, too, had predicted a win 24 hours earlier. He was cautious on primary day, but projected a similar message of persistence … win, lose or draw.

“It’s very important we all know … how important New Hampshire is to our campaign and there’s no sugar coating that,” the Arizona senator said. “It’s absolutely important … Absolutely we are continuing on and we anticipate to win.”

Voting Tuesday was predicted to achieve record turnout as warm weather and high interest swirled together to create energized polling sites.

The former Massachusetts governor made his last stop of the day in Derry with his wife Ann at a middle school, delivering an optimistic message.

Romney spoke about a broken Washington and the need to elect fresh faces, and even predicted the possibility of three different winners in the first three states to select delegates for the presidential conventions next summer. Mike Huckabee won Iowa last Thursday, Romney won Wyoming on Saturday. He left open the possibility that McCain could take New Hampshire and he would place second.

“I think it’s probably going to come down to two people,” he said. “I believe I’m going to be one of the two. We’ll see who the other person is. And we’re going to be battling for quite awhile.”

Following his win in the tiny, early-voting town of Dixville Notch, N.H., just after midnight on Tuesday McCain offered his usual dry humor to make a prediction.

“We’re optimistic about the outcome today, and after a landslide victory in Dixville Notch last night, 4-2, there’s no way that we can stop this momentum,” he said.

Dixville Notch had just 17 voters, and McCain won with four of them. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama won with 7 votes.

Candidates began to wrap up their New Hampshire polling place visits Tuesday afternoon, with most polls closing around 7 p.m. ET, and all finishing by 8 p.m.

Pre-election polls shows Obama continuing to lead in New Hampshire among the Democratic candidates. Rival Hillary Clinton powered through her campaign stops Tuesday with a sense of urgency, seeking to recover her one-time frontrunner status.

She earlier pledged a daylong blitz to get her supporters out to the polls, even as the campaign played down expectations for her finish in New Hampshire. Senior Clinton advisers told FOX News that a shake-up could be on the horizon, and that former Bill Clinton advisers James Carville and Paul Begala may be brought on to assist the campaign as early as Wednesday. Begala and Carville deny this.

The New York senator hit her final polling spot of the day at a school in Concord. There she met with throngs of elementary school kids and even supporters of GOP candidate Ron Paul, whose “End the war!” and “Ron Paul!” chants seemed to drown out those attempting to shout for “Hillary!”

Clinton was expected to end the day at her hotel in Concord, where she was to stay until an evening speech in Manchester.

With polls looking up for Obama, the Illinois senator at a stop in Manchester refused to relinquish the underdog spirit that has defined his campaign.

“My name is Barack Obama. I am never a frontrunner,” he said. “I am always the underdog.”

Meanwhile, supporters chanted John Edwards’ name as he left a polling site in Manchester. He placed second in Iowa.

“I feel great. I feel good,” the former North Carolina said, hoping Clinton would be sufficiently weakened Tuesday to give him an opening.

After a win in Iowa, Huckabee too was hoping for a strong finish in New Hampshire. In Bedford, he tried to sell his outsider image to voters.

“People are so disgusted and frustrated with Washington as it is and I don’t think someone in Washington will be able to get the job done,” he said. ”And I think someone who has a lot of years of practical experience of making government work but also bringing fresh integral change is important.”

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani also made a swing through Manchester, but has already said he’s banking on the bevy of states voting Feb. 5 to carry his candidacy. Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson has already conceded a New Hampshire loss publicly and spent the day Tuesday in South Carolina.

With the temperature in Manchester at 60 degrees, the rare thaw has voters teeming at the polls. New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner predicted turnout at about a half-million, with 260,000 for Democrats and 240,000 for Republicans. That total would be 100,000 more than the all-time primary record.

Gardner had said he was worried that some areas will run out of ballots, even though no polling place did. Vans carrying extra ballots had been dispatched to select areas that could have run low, just as a precaution, but new ballots were not being printed. 

As the 2008 presidential field stormed the state, feeding their staffs and pumping up their supporters with caffeinated beverages along the way, only a few unrevealing results had trickled in, namely that of the small northern town of Dixville Notch.

And survey results are showing that the Democratic vote might be slightly less predictable than the Republican one, according to the latest FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll: 55 percent of independents plan to vote Democratic, and 45 percent said they’ll likely vote for a Republican. In New Hampshire, independents can choose to vote in either primary.

Which way are the winds blowing? On the Democratic side, it looked like the independents were breaking for Obama. In the Jan. 4-6 poll of 500 likely GOP voters, 500 likely Democratic voters with a 3 percent margin of error, 35 percent of independents likely to vote Democratic said they favored Obama, while 26 percent said they planned to vote for Clinton.

Click here to see the full FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll.

Edwards took 18 percent of the likely independent voters, but the outcome is by no means assured. There are another 10 percent of declared independent voters who said that while they planned to vote for a Democrat, they weren’t yet sure for whom.

On the Republican side, the FOX News poll shows a strong tilt toward McCain — who carried the state in 2000 — with 34 percent independent support, followed next by Romney, with 22 percent. The GOP Iowa caucus winner, Huckabee, comes in third at 14 percent.

But another possible monkey wrench for the Republicans is that 12 percent of independents said they remained undecided.

FOX News’ Carl Cameron, Serafin Gomez, Cristina Corbin, Bonney Kapp, Aaron Bruns, Shushannah Walshe and Malini Bawa and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, New Hampshire, Rudy Giuliani, Top Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.