With the votes from New Hampshire tallied and in the record books, the 2000 presidential nominating campaign has moved in separate directions for the two major parties.

State-by-State Results Page National charts and results from the states that have already voted.

For the next few weeks, the Democratic and Republican contenders will be competing on two different playing fields.

While the Democratic candidates face a month-long intermission before the "Titanic Tuesday" cross-country votefest on March 7, Republican John McCain will be testing his new-found momentum in a series of GOP primary contests that sprawl across the month of February.

It is a bit of "island hopping" that should reveal the depth of McCain’s organization and campaign treasury against the GOP front-runner, George W. Bush, who has plenty of both.

THE REPUBLICANS’ FEBRUARY CALENDAR: A month of 'island-hopping'

FEBRUARY 1

New Hampshire Primary (17 delegates at stake)

FEBRUARY 8

Delaware Primary (12)

FEBRUARY 19

South Carolina Primary (37)

FEBRUARY 22

Arizona Primary (30)

Michigan Primary (58)

FEBRUARY 27

Puerto Rico Primary (14)

FEBRUARY 29

North Dakota Caucus (19)

Virginia Primary (56)

Washington Primary (12)

Notes: Hawaii Republicans were to hold caucuses Feb. 7-13, but no straw vote was scheduled to measure voter sentiment. Republicans in American Samoa, Guam and the Virgin Islands will hold caucuses on Feb. 26. Hawaii Republicans will ultimately elect 14 delegates, while the territories voting Feb. 26 will select 4 apiece.

It is a time when the rules also become important. To McCain’s advantage, independents may participate in every Republican primary from South Carolina until "Titanic Tuesday," with the single exception of McCain’s home state of Arizona. The contest there Feb. 22 will be limited to registered Republicans only.

Heightening the intrigue is that the stakes in the GOP contest are quickly growing. In New Hampshire, Republicans divided their small passel of delegates proportionally — with McCain taking 10, Bush 5, and Steve Forbes 2.

But over the rest of February, roughly 250 Republican delegates will be up for grabs, with most to be distributed by some variation of winner-take-all. In South Carolina and Michigan Feb. 22, three delegates will go to the winner in each congressional district with the rest awarded to the winner of the statewide vote. South Carolina has 37 GOP delegates; Michigan, 58.

In Arizona Feb. 22 and Virginia Feb. 29, the stakes are even higher than that. The winner of the statewide vote will win all of the delegates — 30 in Arizona, 56 in Virginia.

It could be a precursor of the voting March 7, when roughly 550 Republican delegates — or more than half the number needed to win the nomination — will be elected in primaries using some variation of winner-take-all.

Hop, skip and jump…

So far, McCain has followed a "hop, skip and jump" strategy, hopping over Iowa to focus hard on New Hampshire, skipping Delaware (and its Republican primary Feb. 8) to jump with both feet into South Carolina Feb. 19. It contrasts with Bush’s promise to compete everywhere.

But McCain rode out of New Hampshire with considerable momentum. That he won was no surprise. That he won by 20 percentage points was astonishing.

None of the pre-primary polls had given any indication that such a landslide was in the making. Pollsters, no doubt, were blindsided by the huge turnout for the Republican primary, roughly 40% of which was comprised of independent voters (who are allowed to participate in either party’s primary in New Hampshire).

Altogether, nearly 240,000 voters cast ballots in the Republican primary, roughly 30,000 more than the previous high for either party, which was set in 1996 when the GOP contest was essentially the only game in town.

McCain faces several big questions as he takes his campaign national:

• Can he replicate his success in the states ahead where he will not have the time to conduct the 100-plus town meetings that he did in New Hampshire?
• Can his momentum trump Bush’s superior resources, particularly when the calendar moves from one or two primaries per week to the large cluster of events in early March?
• And how long can McCain ride the momentum he generated in the Granite State?

Momentum is a perishable commodity that must be reinforced by more victories. When Gary Hart upset Walter Mondale in the 1984 Democratic primary in New Hampshire, Hart rode a wave of momentum that lasted about two weeks before Mondale regained the upper hand.

In 1996, Pat Buchanan got a considerably smaller boost from victory in New Hampshire, and he was unable to win a single primary after that.

But neither Hart nor Buchanan came out of New Hampshire with as big a win as McCain. Not only was McCain’s margin the widest in a contested GOP presidential primary in New Hampshire in 20 years — it was wall-to-wall.

McCain swept all 10 counties in New Hampshire, and dominated voting in communities of every stripe. He carried conservative strongholds like the city of Manchester and old mill towns like Berlin and Claremont with a plurality of the vote, won more moderate cities such as Concord and Portsmouth with a clear majority, and lapped the field in liberal academic communities such as Durham (site of the University of New Hampshire) and Hanover (Dartmouth College), winning the latter with nearly two-thirds of the Republican primary vote.

For good measure, McCain drew more than 3,300 write-in votes in the Democratic primary, almost three times the number of write-in votes that any other candidate of either party received.

Compared to McCain, no other GOP candidate in the Granite State demonstrated much vote-getting appeal.

Not Bush, who failed to draw even one-third of the vote in a single county and could carry only a handful of communities in the sparsely populated northern sector of the state.

Not Forbes, who cracked 20% of the vote in the city of Manchester (where he had the support of the Union Leader) but in few other places.

Not Keyes, who finished in single digits percentagewise virtually everywhere.

Altogether, the socially conservative trifecta of Forbes, Keyes and Gary Bauer that together won a majority of the vote in the Iowa GOP caucuses saw their combined share sink to only 20% in the larger turnout New Hampshire primary. Bauer’s 1% share put the final exclamation point on his faltering, long-shot campaign.

And the Democrats…

On the Democratic side, Al Gore’s 4-percentage point victory in New Hampshire over Bill Bradley was about as decisive as a close victory could be.

Gore easily won New Hampshire’s two largest cities, Manchester and Nashua, swept most of the conservative old mill towns, and carried many of the smaller cities across the state. Altogether, the vice president won eight of New Hampshire’s 10 counties, losing only two small ones (Carroll and Grafton) to Bradley.

Bradley did carry dozens of communities across the state and found a toehold in upscale suburbs such as Amherst and Bedford and academic communities such as Hanover, which — like McCain — he won with two-thirds of the vote.

But Bradley’s chance for an upset victory was blunted by McCain’s greater success in wooing the support of independent voters. New Hampshire exit polls showed that roughly 40% of the ballots cast in both the Democratic and Republican primaries came from independents, and a clear majority of them voted for Bradley and McCain.

But with the statewide turnout for the Republican primary more than 80,000 votes higher than the Democratic, extrapolation would indicate that nearly 60,000 independents voted in the GOP primary for McCain compared to barely 30,000 independents that cast ballots in the Democratic primary for Bradley. An even split of those independents between McCain and Bradley would have given Bradley a clear-cut victory in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary.

Democratic rules would enable Bradley to stay competitive for awhile in the delegate chase even while losing. Unlike the Republicans, with their accent on winner-take-all events, Democratic rules require that the vast majority of Democratic delegates be divided proportionally to reflect primary and caucus results.

Yet Gore has an ace in the hole in the large bloc of superdelegates that will fill nearly 20% of the seats at this summer’s Democratic convention. To loosen Gore’s grip on the superdelegates (Democratic party and elected officials guaranteed delegate slots by virtue of their position), Bradley will have to win some of the key primaries on March 7, most notably, California and New York.