Turnout Brisk In New Hampshire Primary

A Pivotal Day For Candidates As Granite State Voters Head To Polls

(CBS/AP)  John McCain jokingly predicted a landslide while hoping for a mere victory and Hillary Rodham Clinton promised to spare no effort getting her supporters out as New Hampshire primary voters put their stamp Tuesday on a race imperiling presidential ambitions in both parties.

Weather was spring-like and participation apparently brisk, although it remained to be seen whether New Hampshire would match the record-busting turnout of the Iowa caucuses only five days earlier. Republicans, their national race for the nomination tangled, watched a New Hampshire contest unfold between McCain and Mitt Romney at the top of the field, while Democrat Barack Obama bid for a second win against rivals Clinton and John Edwards.

"Today you can make your voice heard - you can insist that change will come," Obama told a crowd Tuesday at Dartmouth College. "The American people have decided for the first time in a very long time to cast aside cynicism, to cast aside fear, to cast aside doubts."

Looking back at his Iowa victory, the man who would be the first black president said: "The state was not, according to the experts, designed for me. There were not a lot of people who look like me in Iowa."

Supporters mobbed an upbeat McCain at a Nashua polling station, making it hard for him to reach voters as they filed inside. Noting he outpolled rivals in two tiny northern hamlets that voted before the rest of the state, McCain cracked: "It has all the earmarks of a landslide, with the Dixville Notch vote."

At Brookside Congregational Church in Manchester, 50 voters lined up before dawn and people waited in their cars for a parking space after doors opened. When Mike Huckabee passed fellow GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani outside, Huckabee jokingly asked the former New York mayor for his vote. "We get along beautifully on the trail," Huckabee said.

"I think he's just gotta kinda hang in here," CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer said about Huckabee on The Early Show this morning. "Nobody that I know thinks he's going to win here, although I must say he is very well received when you go out and watch him at his rallies." Schieffer said Huckabee, the winner of the Iowa caucuses on the Republican side, must simply get through New Hampshire so he can "fight again in South Carolina."

Giuliani waved off a question about his decline in polls, pointing to the church and saying, "The only poll I'm interested in is the one that goes on inside there." That wasn't exactly so. At his New Hampshire headquarters, he asserted that opinion polls in some 15 states find him on top.

The nation's first primary offered Obama a chance to become the clear favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination while McCain and Romney competed head to head in a Republican race that could sink the aspirations of one of them.

Rooting from distant sidelines, Obama's relatives in Kenya sat outside on plastic chairs at the end of a dusty road lined with mango and mimosa trees, listening to radio reports from New Hampshire. The Democrat's uncle, Said Obama, commented that his nephew "has proved to be a beacon of hope here and shown that even in difficult circumstances you can make it to the highest height of achievement with just determination and hard work."

Kogelo, the western Kenyan home village of Barack Obama's father, has been spared the violence that has erupted elsewhere following a disputed presidential election. Obama called Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga on Monday and was expected to do the same Tuesday with President Mwai Kibaki to express concern about the election outcome.

The latest CBS News opinion poll on the Democratic race showed Obama with a seven-point lead on Clinton among New Hampshire likely Democratic primary voters.