{"id":322,"date":"2008-02-06T09:43:49","date_gmt":"2008-02-06T09:43:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/godometer\/2008\/02\/5-lessons-from-hucks-big-day.html"},"modified":"2008-02-06T09:43:49","modified_gmt":"2008-02-06T09:43:49","slug":"5-lessons-from-hucks-big-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/02\/5-lessons-from-hucks-big-day.html","title":{"rendered":"5 Lessons from Huck’s Big Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"huckabee16.jpg\"Do Mike Huckabee\u2019s surprising Super Tuesday victories in the Deep South–where he took Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and West Virginia–translate into a delegate boost that puts him within reach of the Republican nomination? Almost certainly not, though some of the next primary states in line–Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas, provide some Huck-friendly territory. But Huck\u2019s surprise wins yesterday offered important lessons about the state of the Republican race:
\n1. Even as he has emerged as the Republicans\u2019 national favorite–with twice as many delegates as Mitt Romney and three times as many as Mike Huckabee–McCain\u2019s problems with the evangelical base of his own party are only mounting. More on that here<\/a>.
\n2. Mitt Romney\u2019s years-long effort to become the Christian Right\u2019s candidate has failed. Yes, he won over many movement elites, including PR magnate Mark DeMoss, Dominos Pizza founder Tom Monaghan’s, and–tacitly at least–Focus on the Family\u2019s James Dobson. But the movement\u2019 rank-and-file never accepted him. There are three reasons why. First, it\u2019s difficult to campaign as a social conservative when you were emphatically pro-abortion rights and pro-gay rights just a few years ago. Second, Romney\u2019s a Mormon, which exacerbated the trust issues with evangelicals. And third, it\u2019s difficult to be the Christian Right\u2019s golden boy when you\u2019re running against a Baptist minister. In the-pews evangelicals clearly preferred an alternative to John McCain yesterday, and it was Huckabee. Huck won evangelical heavy states like Missouri and Georgia decisively, while Romney\u2019s support came from party moderates. But the same problem that plagued Romney among evangelicals was also a curse among moderates: he won enough of them to be competitive, but not to win moderate states like New York and California.
\n3. David Kuo\u2019s mantra for the \u201908 cycle\u2014that pronouncements of Christian Right leaders matter less than they used to<\/a>\u2014is spot on. (Remember the Christian Broadcasting Network\u2019s Pat Robertson endorsing Rudy Giuliani last year?) In a last-ditch effort to stop McCain, James Dobson issued a blistering statement against him yesterday. But Dobson\u2019s evangelical following, while hardly breaking decisively for McCain, nonetheless provided crucial support for him in many states, including Arizona. At the same time, Huckabee\u2019s surprise Tuesday victories came without help from Christian Right titans like James Dobson or the Family Research Council\u2019s Tony Perkins, who were skeptical that Huck could be a viable national candidate and thought him too soft on fighting terrorism and illegal immigration.
\n4. With the evangelical movement on your side, money and media matter a lot less. Huck\u2019s campaign has always run on shoestring, but Romney\u2019s millions couldn\u2019t buy Huck\u2019s evangelical support. And though the news media wrote Huckabee off after he failed to win another state after Iowa\u2014Huckabee was begging Anderson Cooper to ask him questions during last week\u2019s CNN presidential debate\u2014Huck\u2019s evangelical network more than compensated. The \u201cInvisible Army\u201d strikes again.
\n5. For Republican candidates, winning a huge slice of the evangelical vote is still a prerequisite s for winning the GOP nomination. But it\u2019s not enough. For all his success yesterday, Huckabee still hasn\u2019t broken out of his evangelical base. He hasn\u2019t won a single state where evangelicals account for less than half of primary voters. In key swing states like Missouri, Huckabee won only 20-percent of non-evangelical voters. Which is why the fears of Christian Right leaders over Huckabee\u2019s national viability are well founded.<\/p>\n


\n8<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do Mike Huckabee\u2019s surprising Super Tuesday victories in the Deep South–where he took Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and West Virginia–translate into a delegate boost that puts him within reach of the Republican nomination? Almost certainly not, though some of the next primary states in line–Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas, provide some Huck-friendly territory. But Huck\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mike-huckabee"],"yoast_head":"\n5 Lessons from Huck's Big Day - God-O-Meter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/02\/5-lessons-from-hucks-big-day.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"5 Lessons from Huck's Big Day - God-O-Meter\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Do Mike Huckabee\u2019s surprising Super Tuesday victories in the Deep South–where he took Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and West Virginia–translate into a delegate boost that puts him within reach of the Republican nomination? 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