In the end, Hillary Clinton swayed the uncommitted, generating last-minute support from New Hampshire voters who decided late but never crossed the New York senator off their list of contenders.

"For so long, she did such a good job of introducing herself to voters," said Nick Clemons, the director of Clinton's New Hampshire campaign. "When I look back, I think that she opened the door, and the door was never closed by people. And ultimately the results show that they kept the door open and in the end just walked through."

The under-the-radar support generated by Clinton's final days of campaigning was translated into votes by a disciplined staff that included several veteran state strategists, including Clemons, who previously served as John Kerry's state director. The campaign's vote turnout effort relied heavily on the candidate, who visited her first polling station at 6 a.m. on primary day. In the afternoon - after her aides saw a glimmer of hope for a win here - she stopped working on the speech she planned to deliver that night and returned to the campaign trail, greeting voters and going on talk radio shows.

But coming into voting day, Clemons wasn't expecting a win. As he saw it, his best hope was to stave off a massive loss to Barack Obama, who had opened a double-digit lead over Clinton in weekend opinion polls.

"It was, 'Let's keep this race to single digits; let's hold on to the same margin that we came out of Iowa with, live to fight another day on Feb. 5,' " Clemons said yesterday. The presidential nominating calendar was working against the campaign, Clemons said. With only five days between the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, Clinton had little time to recover from Obama's decisive victory in the caucuses, where he beat Clinton by 8 percentage points.

"We went into the polls closing at 7 o'clock with the thought that if we lose this by 5 (points) we have won this race, because we've closed an 8-point gap, basically," Clemons said.

Over the weekend, Clinton's New Hampshire operation went to work.

Her aides had identified 105,000 households - based on their predictions, they needed to get voters in those households to the polls. Of those, about 70,000 voters were committed to Clinton. The remainder consisted of voters who fit the profile of the average Clinton supporter: In many cases, they were female and working-class. The campaign also weighed education level, marital status and the amount of time a voter has lived in the state.

"People who lived here longer tended to be Hillary voters," Clemons said. "But the most striking thing was that working people are Hillary supporters."

On Saturday, Sunday and Monday, more than 4,000 Clinton volunteers knocked on each of those 105,000 doors. Come voting day, volunteers retraced their steps, visiting all those households for a second time and offering rides to the polls. In the end, the planning may have provided an essential boost, Clemons said. "You work your get-out-the-vote universe so hard, you can move the race two or three points."

In advance of Iowa's caucuses, with the outcome in that contest appearing "pretty muddled," Clinton's campaign launched an extensive absentee ballot program, "which was really above and beyond what we had ever done in the past," Clemons said.

"The point was to try to bank as many votes as we could before Iowa," he said. Although it's unclear how effective that effort was, it was the campaign's attempt to harness the votes of students on vacation and commuters in the southern tier of the state, who might get stuck in traffic and miss out on voting at the polls.

Retooled campaign

Apart from Clinton's ground game here, the five-day sprint between Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses and New Hampshire's primary saw a retooled campaign strategy and numerous opportunities to scrutinize the Democratic candidates.

After landing in New Hampshire after Iowa's caucus, Clinton directed much of the strategy, insisting on taking question after question at events that stretched to nearly two hours, Clemons said. It was a decision that some of her aides "weren't 100 percent sure of" - they worried about transporting her to numerous events each day, and the question-and-answer sessions consumed time. But Clinton stuck to her decision.

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