AMHERST, N.H. — The GOP presidential hopefuls who hit the campaign trail on the Fourth of July spent their time doing much the same thing — over and over again. They walked and waved their way through parades, shook hundreds of hands, and dropped by back-yard cookouts, capitalizing on the day’s patriotic fervor to try to make inroads in key early states.
But their time on the hustings underscored that while their method of face-to-face retail politics is the same, their starting points for the Republican nomination race are miles apart: One race begins in this primary-obsessed state, where Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman Jr. marched in the same parade; another begins in Iowa, where Rep. Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich saw the same flags and smiling faces as they walked down Main Street in Clear Lake, shaking hands and posing for pictures.
Romney and Huntsman have charted their course to the nomination through New Hampshire, where Democrats and independents will play a role in next year’s primary, making the contest look more like the general election.
Bachmann and Gingrich were in Iowa (as was Rick Santorum), battling for the votes of the 60,000 or so mostly conservative caucus-goers who will pick a winner there, giving a candidate the first victory of the 2012 election season.
Bachmann, who announced her candidacy in Waterloo last week and had a strong second-place showing behind Romney in a recent Des Moines poll, vowed to become a regular in the Hawkeye State — where a win could give her candidacy a powerful boost.
“We’ll be back many, many, many times,” she promised.
Read more at The Washington Post.