What a difference a day makes:
Before last Tuesday, Elizabeth Foley had little hope of drumming up many votes for Colorado Senator Gary Hart in Nevada's Democratic caucuses March 13; she headed a totally in adequate band of 30 volunteers.
On Wednesday, she snatched a moment away from answering phones to report: "I've had 50 offers of assistance just today."
Before last Tuesday, only 42 Democrats were running as Hart-pledged candidates in the March 20 primary in Illinois, a state that will send 194 delegates to the July convention in San Francisco. But then nine would-be delegates who will appear on the ballot as pledged to California Senator Alan Cranston announced that if elected they would actually vote for Hart; three turned up at a news conference at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport to vow fealty to their new leader in person. By week's end the count of would-be Illinois delegates defect ing to Hart had passed two dozen.
Before last Tuesday, Hart supporters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology considered canceling a campus rally, fearing that few would show up. But when Hart strode on the stage on Friday, his right hand thrust into his suit coat pocket in a J.F.K. stance, 1,200 students jammed the hall chanting: "Gary! Gary!"
The difference, of course, was New Hampshire. Quirkily independent and cantankerous as always, its voters last week destroyed the idea that the Democratic contest would turn into a brief, glittering coronation parade for former Vice President Walter Mondale. In the nation's first primary, it was the lanky, cerebral Hart, incessantly touting his "new ideas," who not only won but won big.
The 101,129 Granite State residents who mushed through wind-driven snow, freezing rain and slush to cast Democratic ballots on Tuesday gave Hart more than 37% of their votes vs. not quite 28% for Mondale. Moreover, Hart swept nearly every category of voter; one exit poll found that only those aged 60 or over delivered the expected margins for Mondale. In the judgment of House Speaker Tip O'Neill, a Mondale backer, Hart has pulled off "probably the biggest upset in Democratic politics since [Eugene] McCarthy went up against Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire in 1968." Says puzzled Pollster Claibourne Darden, whose soundings failed to gauge the extent of the Hart surge in New Hampshire: "It's just the damnedest thing I ever saw."
Overnight, in short, and quite unexpectedly, the Democratic race has become precisely that—a race. A hard one to figure too.
Adding up the numbers, it is still difficult to find a state in which Hart can be said to have taken the lead, and hard to count any impressive number of delegates he might win even from those states where he has a newborn chance. But in just the first few days after New Hampshire, the change in the tempo of the campaign, and the atmosphere around the two candidates, was almost palpable.