Hillary’s Lead in New Hampshire Disappearing

The latest poll of likely New Hampshire primary voters, published this morning by the Concord (N.H.) Monitor has it Barack Obama 32, Hillary Clinton 31, John Edwards 18, Bill Richardson 8, everyone else less than 5 percent.

If you look at the list of the last 10 or 20 polls taken in New Hampshire, as compiled by the excellent pollster.com, you can see Clinton’s once-commanding lead dissipate pretty quickly, all within the past two weeks or so. Hardly any of the most recent polls show either Democrat with a statistically significant lead.In the breakdowns of this freshest poll by the Concord paper, Clinton still leads solidly among self-declared Democrats. But Obama wins by more among independent voters who plan to vote in the Democratic primary. And, rather amazingly, Clinton’s advantage among women voters has gone away.

On the Repub side, even as Mitt Romney has fallen into second place in Iowa, he continues to hold a commanding double-digit lead in New Hampshire. The Monitor poll suggested that if the election was held today, it would come out Romney 31, Rudy Giuliani 18, John McCain 17 and Mike Huckabee 9 percent.