By Scott MacKay

Journal Staff Writer

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Nearly 200 hands shot up when U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois asked how many of the 700 voters jammed into a cavernous downtown armory were still undecided in New Hampshire’s presidential primary.

Among those with arms raised were Brad and Julia Haley, a married couple, both 37, who moved from the Washington, D.C., suburbs two years ago to take marketing jobs in New Hampshire.

About to cast her first New Hampshire ballot, Julia Haley is torn between Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. Brad Haley says his decision comes down to Obama or Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware.

As the days dwindle to the Jan. 8 election, voters such as the Haleys are crucial to winning New Hampshire’s leadoff primary: convincing undecided voters, many of them new to the state.

A study released last week by the University of New Hampshire confirms what those who follow or work in politics here have long known: that the state’s changing population is forging a New New Hampshire in politics. The old view of the state as a Republican bastion has crumbled, meeting the same fate as the state’s symbol, the fallen Old Man of the Mountain rock formation.

Roughly a quarter of the voters eligible for the primary did not live in the state in 2000, according to the survey released by the Carsey Institute at UNH.

“This is something facing all the campaigns on both sides: How do you find these people?” says Thomas Rath, a veteran Republican operative aligned with Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. Political professionals, Rath notes, abhor uncertainty, and so far it has become impossible to predict either the Republican or Democratic contests.

“All the new people and the independents add another level of complexity this year,” says Rath. “I just think you’re not going to be able to tell what is going to happen until right until the end.”

Public-opinion surveys show nip-and-tuck campaigns on both the Republican and Democratic sides. Obama and Clinton are locked in a statistical tie, with John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, following closely. GOP voters, pollsters report, are favoring Romney, with Arizona Sen. John McCain closing the gap in the past few weeks.

Whether they believe their favorite candidate is acceptable to the larger U.S. electorate is a major factor in so many undecided voters, says Andrew Smith, a University of New Hampshire professor and pollster.

“We are finding that electability is on voters’ minds this year in a big way,” Smith said.

BETWEEN SIPS of coffee at a diner in rural Loudon last week, Alan Gray, who is semi-retired, says he is an independent who leans Republican. Gray moved to New Hampshire from Quincy, Mass., in 2002 and says either Romney or McCain will probably end up with his vote.

“I like McCain, I just don’t know if he can win it all,” says Gray.

With its wood-frame triple-deckers and hulking red-brick mills lining the Merrimack River, Manchester evokes its past on a slate-skied afternoon: a textile factory city of conservative Democrats, many with roots in French Canada. Today this is mostly façade: the old factories are filled with Internet Age start-ups, fancy restaurants and nonprofit education and medical offices.

The political divide in New Hampshire was historically drawn between rural Protestants and urban Roman Catholics. What they held in common was a Frostian, good-fences-make-good-neighbors lifestyle and, in politics, a disdain for large government and taxes; New Hampshire is the lone New England state without a sales or income tax.

But in recent years, the tidy villages with their white Congregational churches and town greens have drawn retirees lured by country living. “These communities have been gradually turning Democratic,” says Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire. “And in the rural parts of the state, there are old native New Hampshire folks who voted Republican for years and now look at the new Southern-based Republican Party and say, ‘This isn’t my party.’ ”

A Democratic voter is now more likely to be a nurse, teacher or retiree than anyone who has anything to do with manufacturing. While the state usually leads New England in economic growth, since 2000 it has also lost a larger percentage of its manufacturing jobs than any other state in the region. A reliable Republican voter is more likely to be self-employed or a tax refugee who moved from Massachusetts.

What no one disputes is that New Hampshire has become bluer, more Democratic. Democrat John Kerry defeated President Bush here in 2004, but it was the 2006 election results that revealed a transformed New Hampshire. New voters and a Democratic surge fueled by distaste for Mr. Bush and the Iraq War led to a historic GOP rout. The state’s two Republican congressmen lost, Gov. John Lynch, a popular Democrat, coasted to reelection, and the state legislature turned Democratic for the first time since 1874.

COMMUNITIES ALONG the Connecticut River, the border between New Hampshire and Vermont, are liberal Democratic bastions. They include such college towns as Hanover and Keene, and are influenced by Vermont media and that state’s brand of live-and-let-live liberalism.

“The area around Dartmouth [College] has always been liberal, but the Upper Valley area is growing in prosperity and population,” says Linda Fowler, a government professor at Dartmouth. “Most of the jobs are professional or high-tech, and so tend to attract people who tend to be socially liberal in their attitudes toward government. In that sense, in-migration to the state is a major factor.”

Republicans do better in the busy Boston suburbs of southern New Hampshire, says Scala, the UNH professor. “I think the Massachusetts emigrants tend to be more Republican.”

GOP voters are much less likely to be motivated by Christian conservatism than in Southern or Midwestern states, such as Iowa, scene of the nation’s first 2008 election showdown, a caucus on Jan. 3. New Hampshire’s religious heritage is mostly mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic. “There aren’t many social conservatives among Republicans up here,” says Smith, the UNH professor and pollster.

Independent voters have long been important in New Hampshire, but never so much as now. More than 40 percent of voters are independent. Changes in election law have made it easier for independents to participate in primaries. Independents can vote in either party primary. Same-day, walk-up registration makes it easy to vote; show a driver’s license and a utility bill, and you’re in.

It was independents who fueled McCain’s startling, 18-percentage-point upset of then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. In that election, 62 percent of independents chose a Republican ballot, compared with 38 percent who voted in the Democratic primary. This time, the polling shows more independents drawn to the Democratic primary than the Republican.

Yet even those responses can be deceptive, says Smith, the UNH pollster, who also surveys the state for the Boston Globe. Up to half of voters who say they intend to vote in the primary also say they may change their minds about the candidates before the election.

NEW HAMPSHIRE is important, of course, because it is the first primary. Between 1952 and 1988, no candidate won the White House without winning the New Hampshire primary. New Englanders, especially political figures from neighboring Massachusetts, have always had an advantage in the state. In 1964, Henry Cabot Lodge, a former Massachusetts senator who was then U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, won the GOP presidential primary without leaving Saigon. Democratic presidential aspirants from Massachusetts who won New Hampshire include John Kerry (2004), Michael Dukakis (1988) and Paul Tsongas (1992).

A New Hampshire primary axiom is that voter turnout is robust, usually 60 percent or more of those eligible. In this respect, New Hampshire’s primary is far more democratic than the Iowa caucuses, a low-turnout affair that generally draws about 10 percent of the electorate.

A New Hampshire myth is that every voter is personally courted by a candidate. The fact is that most voters here receive their political information the same way as voters in the other 49 states — from TV ads and news reports.

Yet there is a kernel of fact in the myth. Nobody gets to be the most powerful person in the world without submitting to the rituals of New Hampshire. Which means running for president as if you were running for governor or state senate. There are endless rounds of handshaking, taking questions from earnest Rotarians, public-school teachers, the town snowplow driver and any crank who shows up at one of the hundreds of events held by presidential aspirants.

The morning after the primary, the presidential campaign changes quickly; candidates do not spend much time in any single state and they greet voters personally only if it gets them a large campaign check or favorable media coverage. The race becomes a whirlwind of airport rallies and TV appearances, as scripted as Hollywood.

For the next 16 days, the campaign belongs to voters such as Jane Davis, a 62-year-old waitress at Manchester’s Merrimack restaurant, a de rigueur stop on the campaign circuit, and her customers, including accountant Michael Bornstein.

“After eight years of George Bush, I’ve almost given up on politics,” said Davis. “I guess I’m undecided; I like Hillary, but I worry that she can’t get elected, that the Midwest and the South won’t support her.”

Said Bornstein, “I’ll probably vote for Mitt Romney. But if I could get McCain off supporting the war, I’d vote for him.”