With each new election cycle, the primary season starts earlier and lasts longer. Although New Hampshire’s presidential primary is still at least eight months away, a number of prospective and declared candidates have already visited the state, including Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, among others. 

Compare that to 40 years ago. John F. Kennedy did not announce his candidacy until January of 1960, just two months before the first primary. 

“Historically, the campaigns really didn’t start until the late fall or even the winter of the year the primary was conducted,” said Andrew Smith, professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire and director of the UNH Survey Center. 

New Hampshire has not yet established its exact date for the 2012 primary, but officials expect to maintain the state’s first-in-the-nation status. That means Republican candidates will once again flood the Seacoast as they vie for the opportunity to square off against Barack Obama in the general election in November 2012.

Nevertheless, Smith said, the vast majority of voters will not actually make up their minds until much closer to primary day.

“Voters in New Hampshire aren’t even going to begin to decide until after the New Year,” he said. 

But voters opinions have been measured virtually since the last election cycle. UNH Survey Center’s latest WMUR Granite State Poll, released May 4, established former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney as the clear frontrunner among potential Republican candidates. About 900 randomly selected adults were surveyed between April 15 and May 2. Of the 416 who planned to vote in the Republican primary, 36 percent said they would likely vote for Romney if the election were held today. 

Romney has maintained a huge lead in every Granite State Poll conducted over the last two-plus years. According to Smith, Romney’s popularity in New Hampshire is due largely to the fact that local voters are already familiar with him. He was the governor of a neighboring state, he owns a house in New Hampshire, and he campaigned heavily here during the 2008 election cycle. 

Perhaps even more important, though, is Romney’s reputation as a moderate. Republican voters in New Hampshire are not as socially conservative as in most other states, Smith said, which bodes well for candidates like Romney.

“He’s largely a moderate New England Republican—what we call a Rockefeller Republican—and that describes most of the Republican voters in New Hampshire,” Smith said.  

But Romney will have plenty of competition. Businessman and reality TV star Donald Trump, who attracted throngs as he strolled around downtown Portsmouth in April, moved into second place in the latest poll with 11 percent. He jumped ahead of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was the third favorite pick with 7 percent. 

However, Trump had the lowest net favorability rating of any candidate in the poll at -14 percent, while Giuliani had the second highest at +30 percent (favorability ratings are determined by subtracting the percentage of people who have an unfavorable opinion of the candidate from the percentage who have a favorable opinion). Romney had the highest favorability rating at +49 percent.

Smith attributed Trump’s recent surge in the polls to the media attention he’s garnered for prompting Obama to produce his birth certificate. Many voters and media members still do not take Trump seriously as a candidate.

“His jump now has more to do with being in the press every day for the last month or so,” Smith said.

Beyond the top three, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Texas Congressman Ron Paul each finished with 6 percent, while 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann each took 4 percent. Rounding out the top 10 contenders were former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, each of whom garnered 2 percent. 

Few Republicans have officially announced their candidacy, and some prospective contenders have already withdrawn their names from the hat, including Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, and South Dakota senator John Thune. 

Following the monumental gains Republicans made in the midterm election last year, the temptation to run against Obama is strong. But unseating an incumbent president is always difficult. According to Smith, Obama’s approval rating must drop below 46 percent for any Republican to have a realistic chance of beating him. The sitting president has a number of significant advantages.

“Number one, he doesn’t face a primary challenger, so he doesn’t get softened up by his own people,” Smith said. “You never want to face a primary challenger when you’re a president.”

Instead, Obama can focus his campaign resources on attacking the top Republican contenders. And those resources will be significant. Obama, who officially launched his re-election bid in early April, hopes to raise a record $1 billion in campaign funding. And, as president, he’ll have greater access to the media than any challenger.

That’s not to say Obama isn’t vulnerable. His approval ratings have been on a steady decline over the last two years. Those ratings received a swift boost after he announced Osama bin Laden’s death (a CBS/New York Times poll released May 4 indicated Obama’s approval rating had jumped from 47 to 56 percent after the announcement), but Smith expects that hike to be temporary. “My sense is he’ll get a small boost, but it’s going to be relatively short lived,” he said. 

The news of bin Laden’s death has already been tainted by reports that he was unarmed when he was shot, as well as questions about whether information gleaned through torture led to the raid on his compound, Smith said.

“All of those things kind of tarnish the glow of capturing and killing bin Laden,” he said. “There are more questions being raised now than there were before.” 

The real trick for Obama, Smith said, will be to demonstrate real economic growth. The Labor Department has announced that the nation added 244,000 jobs in April, but the unemployment rate is still hovering around 9 percent.  

“If unemployment is at 8.5, 9 percent, it’s going to be extremely difficult for Obama to win no matter what happens with foreign policy,” Smith said. “If the economy doesn’t get better for Obama really by the first quarter of 2012, he’s going to face real difficulty.”

The economy will be a hot topic for candidates visiting New Hampshire in coming months, as will the budget deficit, Smith said. Those issues helped Republicans win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm election, and they’ll carry that momentum into 2012.

“Historically, midterm elections presage a shift in the general elections,” Smith said. “If a party does really well in the midterms, that means that party will probably do well in the general election.”

New Hampshire Republicans are already hammering home an economic message, emphasizing the high unemployment rate for April while tactfully ignoring the fact that 244,000 jobs were created. Overall, the unemployment rate increased slightly, but only because more people entered the job market.

“American families simply can’t afford another four years of this president’s tax-and-spend, job-crushing agenda,” N.H. Republican Party chair Jack Kimball said in a press release. “I am confident that our Republican presidential candidates will make certain that Obama is a one-term president.”

State Democrats, meanwhile, have begun launching attacks on Romney. The N.H. Democratic Party recently filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing Romney of funneling soft money into his campaign through political action committees and circumventing contribution limits.

“Romney’s funneling of campaign contributions from his array of state political action committees to fund his presidential campaign reeks of an Enron-style accounting scheme,” said Holly Shulman, spokeswoman for the N.H. Democratic Party, in a press release. “Mitt Romney just wants to be president—plain and simple—and he’ll take any position, say anything or do anything to get there.”

Both parties will continue to exchange verbal barbs as the primary nears. State law mandates that New Hampshire’s primary be held at least seven days prior to any similar election (with the exception of the Iowa caucuses), and party leaders on both sides support the state’s first-in-the-nation status. The 2008 primary was held on Jan. 8.

The Republican National Committee allows four states to hold early primaries or caucuses: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. The Committee asks all other states to hold their primary contests in March or later. Republican and Democratic leaders hope to push all the early contests back to February this year.

But Republicans in Florida have thrown a wrench in that plan. In 2008, Florida violated party rules and held its primary on Jan. 29. The state was penalized with the loss of half its convention delegates. Florida currently plans to hold its 2012 primary on Jan. 31, even if it means losing half their delegates again. That would force New Hampshire to once again hold its primary in January, shortly after the holidays.

State GOP chair Jack Kimball is confident it won’t come to that. “It is critically important that all the states follow the rules that were established and I have been working behind the scenes where it matters with other state chairmen and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus,” Kimball said in an e-mail. “Chairman Priebus has told me that Florida would face heavy penalties for violating the rules.”

Steve Duprey, New Hampshire’s Republican National Committeeman, did not return phone calls seeking comment, nor did Secretary of State William Gardner, who is responsible for setting the state’s primary date.

The debate over whether New Hampshire has undue influence over primary season has been stirring for many years. Leaders in Florida say their larger swing state should have more sway in the nomination process. 

The rationale behind holding the first primary in a smaller state is to stretch out the contest so that subsequent primaries in other states still matter. Candidates who lose New Hampshire and its relatively small number of delegates can still recover. Just ask Barack Obama, who lost New Hampshire to Hillary Clinton in 2008. 

Interest in the 2012 primaries appears to be high. Of those surveyed in the latest Granite State Poll, 93 percent said they were at least somewhat interested in the primaries, and 90 percent said they planned to vote unless an emergency prevented them. Only 7 percent said they would not vote or were not sure. 

Smith said candidates don’t visit New Hampshire quite as often as they once did, mainly because they are spending more time in other early states like Iowa and South Carolina. But, rest assured, all the serious contenders will make stops in the Granite State. 

“The candidates will be here a lot,” Smith said.