I don’t necessarily agree with this spin, but I thought it was worth sharing. Go to the bottom to get my take, if you’re interested.
I received the following e-mail from the Mitt Romney campaign today.
Mike Huckabee won the Iowa Caucuses. In the spirit of graciousness that Mitt Romney exuded last night, Huckabee is to be congratulated. Good job, you won fair and square.
However, in the spirit of an ardent Romney supporter and as someone who likes to look into the detailed demographics of voting/polls, I’d be worried if I were Mike Huckabee.
The New York Times is reporting that OVER 80% of Huckabee caucus supporters described themselves as Evangelical Christians.
Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, rode a crest of evangelical Christian support to victory on Thursday over his rival Mitt Romney, capping a remarkable ascent over the last two months from near the bottom of the Republican field. A poll of people entering the Republican caucuses on Thursday showed more than 8 in 10 of his supporters identified themselves as evangelicals.
The same surveys showed extraordinary turnout among evangelicals, who represented some 60 percent of Republican caucus goers. In years past, Republican Party leaders in Iowa put evangelical turnout at about 40 percent [actually, this story reports that the 2000 evangelical turnout was 39%].
Mr. Romney’s advisers had been saying that if evangelical turnout rose to more than 50 percent, victory would be impossible for Mr. Romney, whose Mormon faith is regarded as heretical by many evangelicals.
And lead paragraphs like this don’t help the image of Huckabee’s win here:
DES MOINES — Just as the Republican caucuses began on Thursday at 6:30 p.m., a small group of women and children joined hands in the middle of the ballroom at Mike Huckabee’s headquarters here and began to pray for his election.
Going back to the numbers . . . Rich Lowry put it pretty clearly:
Here’s one way to look at it: 60% of voters were evangelicals. Huck beat Romney among them 45-19%. 40% weren’t evangelicals. Romney beat Huck among them 33-13%.
Turnout for the GOP in the Iowa Caucuses was projected to be 80,000. It turns out that there were 114,000 voters . . . and it represents the highest turnout of Evangelicals ever (by a long shot) at nearly 70,000.
However, this other New York Times article shows that, while 25% of the US population consider themselves Evangelicals, only 12% of the US population are “traditionalist” Evangelicals. The rest are “centrists” or “modernists” and their votes split between the parties. If Huckabee thinks that he can count on the “traditionalist” Evangelical vote to carry him to the nomination, he’s sorely misinformed. If he somehow manages to get the nomination, Evangelicals surely won’t be enough to carry him into the White House. The Dems are still licking their chops at the prospect of him being the nominee.
The good news heading into New Hampshire is that the Romney camp turned out MORE people than they thought they would–over 30,000 votes. But if not for the super showing by the evangelicals, Romney would have won this going away. His 30,000+ votes among the projected 80,000 voters would have been nearly 40% of the vote . . . a convincing victory similar to Bush’s Iowa win in 2000. Huckabee over-performed last night at nearly 40,000 votes. But LESS THAN 10,000 of those voters were NOT evangelicals (fewer votes than even Ron Paul got in the caucuses). Put another way, only 1 out of every 330 non-evangelical Iowans turned out to vote for Huckabee as their next commander in chief. Hardly a “mandate” for him.
The likely outcome of the Iowa GOP delegate count is very interesting too:
Huckabee – 34% (17 delegates)
Romney – 25% (12 delegates)
Thompson – 13% (3 delegates)
McCain – 13% (3 delegates)
Paul – 10% (2 delegates)
Giuliani – 4% (no delegates)New Hampshire is not “winner take all” for their GOP delegates either (all 12 of them). However NH shakes out, it’s still pretty clear that Romney will be the leader in total delegates after NH (counting the delegates he’ll probably pick up tomorrow in Wyoming). That may be a convincing argument to Romney passing the viability and electability test and being the one who can re-unite the conservative coalition.
Romney supporters need to realize what a strange aberration of evangelical outpouring the Iowa caucus was. Romney turned out his supporters. He’ll do the same in NH. He’s the best candidate we have bar none. As another Romney supporter said, it’s time to quickly lick our wounds and battle on.
COMMENTS from Geoff B: I think there’s some truth to the above, but as much as the Romney campaign wants to spin Iowa, it was still a loss, and a devastating one. Romney has been concentrating resources in Iowa for a year. He made very little headway with key voters there compared to the amount of time he spent there.
I don’t think we can ignore some of Romney’s negatives. For some reason that I personally don’t understand he comes across as not being genuine. I’m not talking about the “flip-flopping,” I’m talking about the claims that he is seems to have the appearance of a used car salesman (or perhaps more accurately a junk bond salesman). As I say, I don’t get this impression at all from him — he reminds me of all of the stake presidents I have ever known in the Church, and they all appeared very genuine to me. But I keep on seeing and hearing this comment all the time — that he does not appear genuine. I don’t think you can ignore those comments.
I think the claim that he is a “life-long hunter” was dumb. I’m sure he wishes he could take that one back. I’m a member of the NRA and favor the 2nd amendment, but I’ve never hunted anything except clay pigeons myself. There are so many other ways you can say you favor gun rights — and garner the support of this very important constituency — without looking like Mike Dukakis on a tank. As I’ve said several times, I don’t like the way he has made immigration such an issue.
But as I’ve said many times before on this blog, I agree with Romney on 90 percent of the issues, and I can’t say that for McCain, Giuliani or Huckabee, not to mention all of the Democrats. I continue to support him.
I’d like to say that the evangelical opposition to Romney’s candidacy makes me extremely sad. Yes, some of it is pro-Huckabee (rather than anti-Romney). But I don’t think we can deny that a large part of it is bitterly anti-Mormon. All reports from Iowa indicate there is a large network of evangelicals and home-schoolers who were specifically mobilized to vote against Romney because of his religion. We always knew a portion of the electorate would respond this way, but frankly I was surprised the numbers of anti-Mormons are as high as they were in Iowa. I hope that trend decreases elsewhere, but sadly I doubt it.
I’d like to make one last point: there has been much talk about the demise of the Reagan conservative coalition. Remember, that coalition was based on uniting foreign policy conservatives, economic conservatives and social conservatives. I firmly believe that this is the only way that a Republican can get elected in November, by being a conservative in all three areas. One of the lessons we have learned from the Bush years is that when a Republican turns wishy-washy in one of the three areas (Bush is an economic moderate, not a conservative, and has done little until recently to try to rein in spending), the coalition begins to fall apart. Nobody but Romney can claim to be a conservative in all three areas. Nobody but Romney will be electable for the Republicans in 2008.