Friday, February 01, 2008

MIKE HUCKABEE, MITT ROMNEY

A Potential Supremely Ugly Fact In the GOP Results

Kathryn noted this in the Corner a bit earlier, but perhaps the idea ought to be denounced by somebody less associated with enthusiasm for Romney.

Post-mortem preview? With Mitt Romney on the ropes, the post-mortems are inevitable; call them O-Mitt-uaries. Anyway, we're starting to hear from a lot of smart Republican strategists about what happened. And the thing that everyone seems to come back to is Romney's religion. Why? Ask yourself: Without the issue of Romney's religion, does Mike Huckabee ever take off? Because Mike Huckabee is the single biggest obstacle to Romney coalescing economic and social conservatives behind him to take on McCain. Take a close look at the Florida results by county from Tuesday night. In more than half of Florida's 67 counties (37 to be exact), the Romney-Huckabee combined vote total equaled or surpassed 50%. And in those counties, 17 of them tipped to McCain. Well, extrapolate this out to, say, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee or Georgia this Tuesday. Will the combined Romney-Huck total surpass 50% while delivering all four states to McCain? Now, if Romney hadn't given evangelicals second thoughts simply over his religion, would Mike Huckabee have happened? It may be Romney needs another four years to convince evangelicals his religion won't interfere with their priorities.

If Romney loses this primary... and if after all the primaries, analysts and race watchers dig into the exit poll data and the demographics and the issue questions and everything else, and it becomes clear that Mitt Romney lost because of his faith, it will be appalling, and the GOP electorate will be rightly derided for applying a religious litmus test.

UPDATE: Well, to the Huckabee supporters out there who feel like I've called them a bigot, I didn't mean you. Or maybe I did. Only you know your reasons for voting for or against a candidate. 

If you're voting against Romney because you like one of the other guys better, or against him for some non-religious reason (flip-flopping, insufficient experience, or whatever) then fine, go right ahead. But if your reasoning is, "I just can't vote for a Mormon," you've chosen a terrible reason to reject a candidate.

One of my regular readers said, "Did it ever occur to you that evangelicals are voting for Huckabee because, well, he’s an evangelical? Let's denounce all the Mormons who voted for Romney.  How shameful of them!"

Except I actually did criticize Mormons who voted for Romney out of religious solidarity after the Nevada caucuses... generating about as much offended e-mail that evening as I've gotten today.

That's my reassuring message to anyone whose bent out of shape about this post — if this bugged you, I've bugged the other guys even worse before. 

02/01 02:24 PMShare