WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney easily won the first primary in the nation on Tuesday, claiming the Republican Party's New Hampshire contest with 38 percent of the vote.
The victory was the second in a row for Romney - although it was not nearly as close as last week's win in the Iowa caucus that saw him prevail by just eight votes over former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.
CNN called Romney the winner moments after the clock struck 8 p.m. on the eastern coast. The speech he delivered shortly thereafter was aimed more at President Barack Obama than at any of his rivals.
'Today we're faced with the disappointing record of a failed president,' Romney told supporters at his campaign headquarters in Manchester. 'The last three years have had a lot of change, but they haven't offered much hope.'
Texas congressman Ron Paul was second with 23 percent, followed by former Utah governor Jon Huntsman with 17 percent.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum had 10 percent apiece.
Texas governor Rick Perry, who didn't contest the state, was sixth with 1 percent.
Romney had entered the primary with a wide lead, hauling in as much as 41 percent of the vote in some of the polls.
And as the clear frontrunner in the bid to land the GOP's presidential nomination in 2012 and try to unseat Obama, Romney drew major fire from his Republican rivals in a pair of Granite State debates over the weekend.
'If his record was so great as governor of Massachusetts, why didn't he run for re-election,' Santorum said of Romney, who began his unsuccessful 2008 bid for the Republican presidential nomination very shortly after his one term as the Bay State's chief executive.
Also hammering Romney, Gingrich said the former governor lacks electability, calling him 'timid,' at the debate in Concord, N.H.
'I think that a bold Reagan conservative, with a very strong economic plan, is a lot more likely to succeed in that campaign than a relatively timid Massachusetts moderate, who even The Wall Street Journal said had an economic plan so timid it resembled Obama,' Gingrich said.
But Romney stood by his record as governor and a businessman.
'I'm very proud of my record and I think the one thing you can't fool the people of New Hampshire about is the record of a governor next door,' Romney said.
In 2008, the New Hampshire primary was prophetic on a national scale for the Republicans, but less so for the Democrats.
Arizona senator and eventual GOP presidential candidate John McCain was the surprise winner for the Republicans in 2008, notching 37.1 percent of the vote. Romney was second with 31.6 percent, followed by Mike Huckabee at 11.2 percent and Rudy Giuliani at 8.6 percent.
For the Democrats, the winner was Hillary Rodham Clinton with 39.1 percent of the vote. Obama was second with 36.5 percent, followed by John Edwards at 16.9 percent and Bill Richardson at 4.6 percent.
Next up is the South Carolina primary on January 21 and the Florida primary on January 31.
Both of these figure to test Romney's status as the frontrunner, as these southern states have a much heavier concentration of the conservative and evangelical base that has so far given the more moderate Romney problems.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX