HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. – Arkansas Governor Huckabee’s appeal can’t be strictly religious. Or at least it isn’t limited to it.
Iowa is five percent Baptist. South Carolina, by comparison, is 45 percent Baptist.
And yet in Iowa, Huckabee’s taking off — 31 percent in the Quad City Times poll, 36 percent in the Hotline/FD poll, 39-percent in Rasmussen, and 30 percent in the Strategic Vision poll. In all of those polls, his closest competitor Mitt Romney is stuck in the mid-20s.
In South Carolina, Huckabee has jumped, but finds himself in a much tighter race — up six in Insider Advantage, up 7 in Rasmussen, up 3 in Mason-Dixon, up 11 in Survey USA, up 7 in CNN. He tops out at 30-percent in Survey USA’s poll, and it’s getting 20 to 25 percent of that field in the other polls. And the most recent Rasmussen poll released this week puts him tied with Romney.
(It’s worth noting that two of his rivals in South Carolina, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, have more or less written off hopes of winning Iowa.) Still, Giuliani and McCain don’t seem to be the types to snatch the religious right vote away from Huckabee.
So why is Huckabee running away with a state that, at first glance, should be a tougher sell? And why is he not exploding ahead of the pack in the Palmetto State as he is elsewhere?
Recent history
suggests that Iowa Republicans have a history of falling hard for the candidate who wears his religion on his sleeve the most. Pat Robertson’s victory in the 1988 Iowa Straw poll was seen a key moment in the rise of the religious right, and that year Robertson finished six percent ahead of sitting Vice President George H.W. Bush. Pat Buchanan came within three percent of Bob Dole in 1996 and Alan Keyes — a fringe candidate everywhere else, symbolized by his willingness to jump into a mosh pit to the music of Rage Against the Machine on Michael Moore’s television show — managed third place in 2000 with a respectable 14-percent (John McCain skipped the caucuses that year).
The state GOP puts evangelicals and social conservatives at between 50 and 60 percent Iowa caucus voters.
David Brody of CBN
describes a further rally-around-the-flag effect among these voters, as Iowan evangelicals instinctively dig in to support an openly Christian figure when they’re attacked, as Huckabee has been in recent weeks.
“All these stories attacking Huckabee may hurt him in New Hampshire and in other states across the country,” Brody concludes.
But in Iowa, among evangelicals, it’s a different mind set. These stories can actually have the reverse effect with Evangelicals saying, ‘stay strong Mike. Everybody is coming against you because you wear your faith on your sleeve.’ This is usually the mentality when ‘one of their own’ is attacked. Unless he’s done something so reprehensible, it’s going to take something pretty big to stop Huckabee’s momentum in Iowa with Evangelical Christians.
By comparison, in South Carolina, the religious conservative community is active and vocal, but less unified. As the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life describes the fault lines:
The Christian conservative movement has been a part of South Carolina’s political culture since the 1960s. It is comprised of three main branches within the state: the Bob Jones University loyalists, the Christian Coalition conservatives and the Southern Baptists. All three groups are conservative and Christian, but they do not always back the same candidates or agree on every issue. The BJU contingent assimilated into the state GOP in the 1970s and 1980s and continues to wield power in South Carolina. The Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority never gained as strong a foothold in South Carolina as in other Southern states, and by 2002 the coalition had essentially fallen apart. Southern Baptist clergy have become increasingly politically active in South Carolina but do not have an extensive central organization.
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