Romney Loses Ground In New Hampshire

The Democrats are the ones debating in New Hampshire tonight, but there's some news on the Republican side out of the state today as well. The Associated Press passes along the results of the latest CNN-WMUR poll of New Hampshire adults who said they plan to vote in the state's Republican primary, and the news isn't good for Mitt Romney: He polls at 23 percent, down from 33 percent in July.

That's still good enough to put him in first, but not by much: Rudy Giuliani comes in at 22 percent and John McCain at 17 percent. With a margin of error of 5.5 percentage points in the poll, that means it's very much anyone's ballgame. As for the other candidates, Fred Thompson comes in at 12 percent and Newt Gingrich at 7 percent.

New Hampshire is considered relatively friendly ground for Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts. He is the only Republican to have run TV advertisements there, and he needs a strong showing in the early primary state if he hopes to create a sense of inevitability about his candidacy. But it looks like he's in a dogfight, and it won't help that the McCain campaign will be rolling out a statewide advertising campaign in the next few days.