Polls Beginning to Close in New Hampshire

AP - Fournier Playing to huge crowds of wavering voters, Democrats swapped charges of dirty tricks and elitism Monday.

"It's close and it's closing fast," Howard Dean said, accusing his rivals of smearing him in a shadowy phone-and-mail campaign. "I need your help because we have every intention of winning the New Hampshire primary."

Most public polls gave fellow New Englander John Kerry a double-digit lead over Dean, a former Vermont governor, though at least one survey had the pair in a dead heat. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut were trailing.

(Uncomfirmed sources say Joe Lieberman will drop out)

Campaign strategists said internal polls and anecdotal evidence indicated that Dean and Edwards had the most momentum in the race's final hours.

The hotly contested early stages took a toll on the candidates, their voices raspy and no sentence safe. Dean's support of the people's right to vote became "the people's vote to right" in a tongue-twister at his first event.

Dean called himself fiscally conservative, socially liberal and the one candidate willing to take tough stands.

A spokesman said later that Dean supporters are getting phone calls criticizing Dean for, among other things, claiming to be a Christian when his wife and children are Jewish.

"Show me some evidence," said Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter, denying any involvement.

Edwards, addressing an overflow crowd of 400 in Portsmouth, N.H., took a familiar jab at his rivals as he called for change in Washington. "Do you believe somebody that's been in politics all of their life, or in Washington for decades, will bring that change?" the first-term senator said.

"I didn't go to Yale" or enjoy a privileged upbringing, Clark said in Keene, N.H. Kerry, Dean and Lieberman graduated from the Ivy League school, as did Bush. "Unlike all the rest of the people in this race, I did grow up poor."