Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is surging in Iowa.
Mason-Dixon released a poll today putting Huckabee on top by 12%.
A poll from Princeton Survey Research conducted Dec. 5-6 has him
at 39%, with Mitt Romney second at 17%, Fred Thompson at 10%, and
the rest in single digits, with Rudy Giuliani barely edging out
Ron Paul for fourth place. An ARG poll taken a week earlier has
Huckabee at 27% and Romney at 28%. A Des Moines Register poll
taken a day before the ARG poll has Huckabee leading Romney
29% to 24%. While the numbers are debatable, there is little
doubt that Huckabee has caught fire in Iowa. What's going on?
It has been known all year that Republicans are extremely
unhappy with their field of candidates. Seen from the point
of view of a southern white evangelical, each of the main GOP
candidates is deeply flawed. Giuliani is a thrice-married,
pro-abortion, pro-gay-rights, anti-gun, lapsed Catholic
New York liberal.
Romney is a flip-flopping Mormon with good hair and no core
beliefs. Thompson isn't sure why he is in the race exactly,
since he doesn't seem to have much real interest in running
for President, let along being President. McCain is a solid
conservative who doesn't hate immigrants as much as Tom Tancredo
and who authored the much-hated McCain-Feingold bill, which
puts ever-so-modest spending limits on campaigns. The rest
of the field are not taken seriously.
Until recently, Huckabee was in the latter group, but
finally, the Base has noticed that he is actually in step
with them. He is an ordained Baptist minister and deeply
religious. He can claim to love Jesus without it sounding
ridiculous (can you imagine Giuliani saying this) and has
a long record of opposing abortion and same-sex marriage.
Finally, they have found their boy.
At least in Iowa. In New Hampshire, Huckabee is regarded
as a strange hillbilly who lived in a trailer as governor
(because the governor's mansion was being refurbished).
In a Washington Post poll ending
Dec. 3, Romney leads with 37% and Huckabee comes in fourth
at 9%. Other polls in New Hampshire should roughly the same
thing. The difference has everything to do with the electorate.
While Iowa is technically outside the Bible Belt, Iowa
Republicans tend to be demographically, religiously, and
ideologically pretty much the same as their southern cousins.
Abortion and gay rights are high on the agenda.
New Hampshire Republicans are a crusty
bunch of libertarians and care much more about taxes and
balancing the budget than the social issues. Besides, Romney
was a neighbor when he was governor of Massachusetts and
governed as a centrist. Coming up with a health-care plan
gets him admiration in New Hampshire but not in Iowa.
Thus the $64 question is what happens if Huckabee wins
Iowa (Jan. 3) and Romney wins New Hampshire (Jan. 8), both seen as increasingly
likely events? The next primary is Michigan (Jan. 15), which Romney
might win if for no other reason that his father was once a popular
governor of the state.
Next come Nevada and South Carolina (both Jan. 19).
Romney is ahead in Nevada (which has a sizeable Mormon population)
but Huckabee is surging in South Carolina as well. Recent Rasmussen
and Insider Advantage polls concluded Dec. 4 give Huckabee a lead of
6-7% there. Finally, we come to Florida, with its renegade primary
(opposed by both parties) on Jan. 29. It is conceivable, no likely,
that Giuliani will not have finished higher than third in any
caucus of primary for a month and the news will be Huckabee-Romney
24/7 for a month. Giuliani is way, way, ahead in Florida (after all,
the state is overrun with elderly former New Yorkers), but after
weeks of headlines saying "Is Giuliani Dead?" winning this one will
be tough. Then a week later, all the big states vote. Huckabee isn't
even on the radar in places like New York and California.
Conclusion: it is really up in the air. Any pundit who tells you
what is going to happen has been smoking something and inhaling it.
A lot of people know almost nothing about Huckabee except that
he is a former governor of Arkansas and a Baptist minister. Well,
there is a lot more and much of it will be coming out shortly.
Here is a brief rundown.
Huckabee wasn't actually elected governor initially. When Bill Clinton
became President in 1992, the then Lt. Gov., Jim Tucker, ascended to
the governor's mansion and a special election was held to fill the
Lt. governor's job. Huckabee ran and narrowly won. When Tucker resigned
due to a mounting corruption scandal, Huckabee became governor in
1996 (in the middle of his Senate run, which he abandoned).
Huckabee used to be fat. As in grossly
clinically obese. So fat that he could barely walk
up the steps to his office as governor (there is no elevator) and was
scared to death some reporter would corner him exhausted at the top
of the steps.
Then he got a diagnosis of diabetes and told he would live maybe 10 more years.
This scared the daylights out
of him. He lost 110 pounds and wrote a book entitled "Quit Digging
Your Grave with a Knife and Fork" and became a health freak.
He even challenged Iowa's governor, Tom Vilsack (D), to a marthon
and beat Vilsack by 50 minutes.
As governor, not surprisingly, he paid a lot of attention to the
state's health care system and got generally good marks for his work.
His record on taxes was mixed. He lowered some and raised some.
Many tax-cutting Republicans don't trust him on this issue.
When the mud begins to fly, you will see the name Wayne DuMond a lot.
He's Huckabee's Willie Horton, but worse. As you may remember, when Gov. Mike
Dukakis of Massachusetts was running for President in 1988, the Republicans
ran ads against him featuring scary photos of an African-American convicted
murderer named Willie Horton, who was given a weekend furlough on a
furlough program that Dukakis did not initiate but did support.
While on furlough he committed armed robbery and raped a woman. Dukakis
knew nothing about Horton until the ads started, but they contributed to his
"weak on crime" image and ultimately to his defeat.
Huckabee has a Willie Horton problem in spades.
In 1984, a 35-year-old white man named Wayne DuMond was convicted of raping a
17-year-old cousin of then-governor Bill Clinton.
DuMond was later castrated, although whether this act was forceable or
self-inflicted in hope for mercy is controversial.
As governor, Mike Huckabee actively lobbied the parole board to
release DuMond, which it did.
DuMond then murdered a Missouri woman.
Needless to say, this story is going to be all over the place if the
Huckabee surge continues. Most likely, it will be brought up not by
the Democrats, but by Huckabee's Republican opponents, many of whom
think of him as a RINO (Republican in Name Only).
Finally, Huckabee's stand on immigration is going to hurt him with the
Tancredo crowd when it becomes better known. As governor, he supported state-sponsored
prenatal care for pregnant illegal immigrants and also supported the right of
illegal immigrants to apply for state college scholarships if they graduated
from an Arkansas high school. If you don't like Eliot Spitzer's idea of allowing
illegal immigrants to apply for drivers licenses, you probably won't like Mike
Huckabee's idea of allowing them to apply for state scholarships.
With his stand on taxes, crime, and illegal immigrants, Huckabee provides
a target-rich environment for his opponents to toss mud his way when the going
gets rough. Stay tuned.
This page is the prototype for 2008. The data and map will refer to previous
elections until serious polls begin in 2008. The blog will be updated when
there is interesting news about the 2008 races.
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