New Hampshire is now more of a swing state than is New Mexico, at least according to two recent polls (although neither is PPP, so the comparison may not be especially good).
The Magellan poll (sure, it is an R pollster) gives the President a 50% approval rating in New Hampshire and matchups with Romney, Huckabee, Gingrich, and Palin. But -- Sarah Palin does not do so catastrophically badly in a matchup with President Obama (she is much closer to either Romney or Huckabee in the state -- although they all would lose) as she does in California, Colorado, or New Mexico.
The percentage of people who are non-native speakers of English is surely much lower in New Hampshire than in California, Colorado, or New Mexico where she fares execrably in contrast to Romney, Huckabee, or even Gingrich. The difference isn't that PPP results catch a rapid meltdown of support that one didn't see earlier; the polls for New Hampshire are roughly contemporaneous with those in the three western states with large Hispanic populations. She has no particular reason to be particularly strong in New England.
Again, listen to her speech patterns and try to figure whether someone not a native speaker of English (no matter how proficient one is) would have trouble with her speech as they wouldn't with, for example, Mike Huckabee. She isn't an out-and-out bigot. I figure, though, that she would do very badly among the native speakers of French, Italian, or Portuguese in New Hampshire.
You might be right about the linguistics. The irony is, that if you press Palin beyond just talking points and rhetoric, her real immigration position is not that different from Bush, or atleast that is what Roy Beck claims on his site (he even ranks her about with Obama, granted his scoring and advocacy are to the extreme, so the similarities are slightly exaggerated).
