The two victors in yesterday's New Hampshire primary both benefited from an electorate that decides late and moves fast. Both began as the favorites and wound up the unlikely victors.

Despite these similarities, the roads Hillary Clinton and John McCain traveled to victory were as different as the two candidates themselves.

What happened? Let's have a look, beginning on the Democratic side.

Forget the polls. Forget the pundits. Forget the best political team on television. Let's count the votes.

No one saw Clinton's victory coming. No one believed she would be the new Comeback Kid, one-upping her husband's 1992 performance by actually winning

the New Hampshire primary. No one thought anyone could overcome a double-digit deficit in the polls in less than 24 hours.

If anything, the experts expected that Barack Obama, the charismatic senator from Illinois, would widen his lead by election day.

And if anyone were to tell you in this morning's paper how Clinton did it, that person would be making stuff up. But allow me to speculate.

First, the easiest thing for a candidate to do in the New Hampshire primary is to get back voters whom he or she has lost along the way. That's not to say early polls are any more than vague preferences by voters who don't even know the field yet. But an initial inclination to vote for a candidate sometimes returns on the way to the voting booth.

Second, everyone believed, as I did, that there was too little time between Iowa and New Hampshire for a candidate to create a second act or get a second wind. But Clinton clearly succeeded in this.

Who knows what worked. Maybe it was the case Clinton made against Obama's lack of experience. Maybe it was the perception that Obama and John Edwards had ganged up on her at the last debate. Maybe it was her decision to throw away her script during her final events and take questions from voters. Maybe it was the emotion she showed on the last morning before Election Day - the emotion of a real human being who had given her all for a meaningful goal.

Third, perhaps election data will show that women voted for Clinton in greater proportions than any poll had measured. Perhaps when it came down to the actual poll - the actual election - they saw something in Clinton they had not seen before. Maybe they decided New Hampshire should at least give the best female presidential candidate in history a chance to fight another day.

Whatever factors led to Hillary Clinton's stunning victory, voters rewarded a candidate of tenacity and a record of accomplishment. They rewarded a campaign carried out in the best New Hampshire tradition. They stared down the Hillary haters, and they ignored the opinion makers.

Yes, let this be a lesson to us all. Before we declare the winner, let's not forget to count the votes.

The Republicans

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