Huckapalooza

The Dark Lord of Paleoconservatism Daniel Larison brings some bad news for Huckabee supporters:

When looked at in more detail, the Mason-Dixon results are just weird in some places.  Unsurprisingly, Huckabee wins among “born-again” Christians 42-8 over Romney (and narrowly loses among  those who are not “born-again”), but inexplicably leads among voters who think ”national security and terrorism” is the most important issue and among voters who think immigration is the most important.  Again, unsurprisingly, he leads among morality/family values voters by a staggering margin.  In short, on the three general issues that are most important to Iowan Republicans, Huckabee has somehow become the leader virtually overnight.  Voters who want a general election winner in November prefer Huckabee, as do voters who emphasise leadership as the most important quality in a candidate (what leadership has Huckabee shown that they would have ever heard about?).  Huckabee leads among both those who favour a “hard-line” approach to immigration (meaning deportation plus enforcement against employers) and a “comprehensive” (i.e., weak) approach.  The most baffling part is that he leads among the “hard-line” voters (who make up the majority of the respondents) by a larger margin (15 points) than he does among the others (7 points).  Romney has bigger immigration problems than the people his landscaper hires.  After a year of pretending to care about illegal immigration and adopting all the right rhetoric that should please the “hard-line” voter, he is losing (badly) to another former governor who used to be even more pro-amnesty and pro-immigration than he was.  This simply makes no sense.  According to this poll, over half of Iowa  caucus-goers want the government to deport illegal immigrants and they are backing a candidate who is one of the least likely to ever consider doing anything like that.  It also makes no sense that Tancredo isn’t doing a little bit better than he is (2% overall and only 4%  among the “hard-line” voters).  Perhaps craziest of all, those who think the economy is on “the right track” favour Huckabee by 18 points over Romney, while those who think it is on “the wrong track” just barely prefer Romney.  Didn’t these people get the memo that Huckabee is the economic populist supposedly worried about the woes of Main Street and Romney is the optimistic venture capitalist who thinks things are in fine shape? 

I know my fingerprints were on the economic populist memo.  Some would probably wonder how good poll numbers would be bad news.  They are bad news when one’s supporter’s incorrectly state the candidate’s views.  While I think that there are additional supporters for Huckabeee to gain, Huckabee will do well to maintain his current support by adding those people, because he will lose people as they learn who the real Huck is.  But all is not dead roses as Josh Trevino notes in his piece discussing Huckabee and the Club for Growth.

Within the fiscal conservative and libertarian segments of the Republican coalition, there is sincere concern that this signifies an abandonment of the free-market principles that were once party hallmarks. This concern is implicitly amnesiac: fiscal rectitude as a Republican strength was lost sometime between the return of federal deficits and the passage of Medicare Part D. The “values voters,” suburban populists, and religious-minded Americans who form Huckabee’s base feel no sense of responsibility for that turn of events — nor should they. Nor do they understand, if they think about it at all, why the Club for Growth anathemizes Mike Huckabee to the outer darkness, but not George W. Bush for his own far worse fiscal record. It smacks of the worst sort of inside-the-Beltway backstabbing. Indeed, though the substance of the CFG’s critique has some merit (even if the style borders on the hysteric), that is more or less what this is.

….But this must be clear: the overwhelming majority of Huckabee supporters are not apostates from the dicta of markets that has brought us such prosperity in our lifetimes. They want low taxes and small government as fervently as the most stalwart CFG man. But that is not all they want. In elections past, they could have it all, or something like it: even George H.W. Bush delivered rhetoric on “family values.” Now, with Romney untrustworthy on their issues, and Giuliani nakedly hostile, they are forced — by the fiscal conservative and libertarian factions themselves — to choose between God and Mammon. They choose God.

 Paul Cella of Red State largely echoes these sentiments and asks the question, “But why oh why is George W. Bush acceptable to the fiscal conservatives, while Mike Huckabee is fatal anathema?”