The Hits on Huck: Aimed at South Carolina, Not Iowa?

Friday, December 14, 2007

MIKE HUCKABEE

One of my readers in Myrtle Beach writes regarding Ruffini's contention that Mike Huckabee — "For his voters, he’s a Christian first, and a conservative second. Attacking him on conventional conservative issues won’t undermine his core support because it has nothing to do with being a conservative."

This South Carolina reader thinks that the Christian conservative electorate in his home state is stylistically quite different from the one in the Hawkeye state.

Huckabee hasn’t been hit very hard up to now, I think, because of Iowa’s pretentious dislike for negative campaigning. We here in South Carolina do not have these objections.

We do have a large Christian conservative population, but while many of these voters place a premium on Christianity, they also place a high value on conservatism in other areas. My theory is that the GOP’s Christian voters in Iowa are more open to populism than conservatism on non-social issues than we here in the South are. I may be wrong, but I believe that the majority of GOP Christian voters here in South Carolina want you to be a Christian, but also want a true conservative regarding taxes, immigration, foreign policy, etc. Right now, Huckabee is perceived as both a Christian and as a true conservative. That is, I think, about to change. Romney and, especially, Thompson are going to have to throw everything they can at Huckabee between January 4 and January 19. If they can convince enough evangelical voters here that Huckabee is a Jimmy Carter-type Christian leftist, I believe he will lose a chunk of his support. Not all, but a good chunk. I may be wrong, but I’ve lived here long enough and seen enough statewide races to have what I think is a decently accurate picture of our population.

My gut instinct is that this is right. Certainly tough, tough attacks on John McCain were not punished by the Republican primary voters of South Carolina in 2000. And the state doesn't seem like an ideal incubator for the "religious left" style candidates.

And as Byron noted a few weeks ago in Beaufort, there's a significant chunk of the Low Country vote that is transplanted yankees. The Sun City retirement community, Hilton Head...

I'll be doing in-depth investigations of that region over the next two weeks...

12/14 10:08 AM Share