MANCHESTER, N.H.--Jim D. Warlick has been predicting the results of state primaries and caucuses almost to the exact percentage point for the past 12 years.

He is no pollster, political analyst or election guru. He's not even a reporter. He just sells campaign buttons--lots of them.

Warlick, who owns a D.C.-based political paraphernalia company, has been making his picks based on a computerized inventory of button sales and claims to have a near perfect record for the past decade.

Just hours before the polls closed here Tuesday evening, Warlick made his predictions for the nation's first primary.

Warlick said President Bush would win 56 percent of the vote and Patrick J. Buchanan would finish at 43 percent. Most pollsters and analysts were saying Buchanan would do well but not that well.

Bush aides had said that anything more than a 35 percent showing for the conservative commentator would be embarrassing. When Buchanan first entered the race, Bush was considered untouchable.

But the angry residents of New Hampshire proved pundits wrong. Buchanan earned more than 37 percent of the vote and Bush ended with 53 percent--doing worse than even Warlick expected.

In the close and muddled Democratic race, Warlick picked former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas to win with 35 percent, followed by Gov. Bill Clinton with 26 percent.

The analysts, however, projected Clinton to do much worse; several pollsters expected him to win barely 20 percent of the vote.

As it turned out, Warlick's button-sales-derived prediction was more accurate. The official tally gave Clinton 24.7 percent. He did better than the analysts expected and worse than the button seller thought he would.

But in the topsy-turvey world of presidential politics, where perception is everything and reality is merely a shadow of itself, a candidate only needs to do better than expected.

Although Clinton placed second in the hotly-contested primary, he delivered quite a victory speech on Tuesday, calling himself "the comeback kid."

Buchanan also found victory in defeat. The conservative columnist didn't even surpass the symbolic threshold of 40 percent--although Wednesday's newspapers reported that he did.

Despite his literal failure, the media--and thus the public--declared Buchanan as the winner and Bush as the clear loser.

The president's poor showing, at least, may be grounded in reality.