Donald Trump is the wier in the New Hampshire Republican primary and Ohio Gov. John Kasich will take second place, Fox News projects.
The battle for third, though, remains a fierce contest among three candidates – Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
It is too early to project how those three will finish, though Rubio is trailing that group in early retus.
On the Democratic side, meanwhile, Vermont Sen. Beie Sanders decisively beat Hillary Clinton, in another setback for her campaign after she barely eked out a victory last week in Iowa. The Clinton campaign tried to cast the candidate’s primary loss in the best light, saying in a memo that the outcome was “long expected” and prospects for future victories remain “very good.”
“I want to say I still love New Hampshire and I always will,” Clinton told supporters at a Tuesday night rally. “Now we take this campaign to the entire country. We are going to fight for every vote in every state.”
The primary projections are based on Fox News exit polls and early voting retus.
On the GOP side, early retus show Kasich with about 16 percent.
Bush (12 percent), Cruz (12 percent) and Rubio (10 percent) are trailing closely behind.
Fox News can project that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will finish sixth, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina will finish seventh, and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson will finish eighth.
For Kasich, his time in the state appeared to pay off and the second-place finish gives a major boost to his campaign, especially after he finished a distant eighth in Iowa last week.
It also deals a blow to Rubio, whose strong, third-place finish in Iowa eight days ago gave him momentum that lasted until Saturday, when Rubio stumbled in a debate. Speculation over whether Rubio stalled his momentum with the rocky debate performance appeared well-founded – as retus showed him struggling to break onto the leaderboard
The closeness of the race for second, third, fourth and fifth places might end up prolonging the Republican nominating contest because it complicates the establishment’s efforts to coalesce around a single consensus candidate.
Meanwhile, Trump’s victory, while expected, is a comeback of sorts for the real estate mogul who last week was beaten by Cruz in Iowa. It helps cement his front-ruer status in the crowded GOP field. Early retus show him dominating with 34 percent of the vote.
Yet the person who tripped up Rubio in Saturday’s debate, Christie, was mired in single digits in Tuesday's race.
Exit polls suggest Trump was aided in large part in the state by independents.
They showed 36 percent of the state’s influential independents were backing Trump, leading the field among that bloc.
Independents matter because the state's “undeclared” voters -- a huge chunk of the electorate -- are allowed to affiliate with a party at the polling site and vote in that party’s primary.
On the Republican side, Trump led virtually every poll in the state in the run-up to the contest.
And on the Democratic side, Clinton consistently trailed Sanders going into Tuesday’s contest. She could be looking at a big margin of defeat, with early retus showing Sanders wiing 58-40 percent.
Clinton herself has pushed back on reports that the campaign may be looking at a shake-up in the near future – but the speculation is sure to mount following her Granite State loss.
“We're going to take stock, but it's going to be the campaign that I've got,” Clinton told MSNBC on primary eve. “I'm very confident in the people that I have. I'm very committed to them, they're committed to doing the best we can.”
The race on the Republican side has been even more competitive than in Iowa, with a half-dozen candidates fighting for the top three positions in New Hampshire. Below Trump, that fight is still not resolved.
The race oftentimes had the three current and former goveors pitting their on-the-job experience against the popular appeal of the contest’s two senators.
Rubio in particular has weathered the brunt of the attacks in recent days. He was thrown off stride over the weekend, as Christie battered him at Saturday’s debate over his relative inexperience and reliance on campaign “talking points.”
Rubio, for his part, has not backed off the anti-Obama “talking points” Christie hammered him for at Saturday’s debate. The senator told Fox News he’s only saying what he believes, that “Barack Obama is changing America.”
From here, the campaigns head next to Nevada and South Carolina, which hold the next two contests before Super Tuesday at the begiing of March.