Saturday 19 September 2009

Huckabee is winning over the Palin voters for 2012

The Values Voter Summit held a straw poll for GOP presidential candidates, and Huckabee mopped the floor with everybody. Huckleberry got 29 percent, while Romney, Pawlenty, Palin (a no-show again) and Pence got about 12 percent each. Gingrich and Jindal barely moved the needle. Keeping in mind that the voters here were “values voters”, these results indicate that social conservatives seem to be moving away from Palin and Gingrich and into Huckabee’s camp by default, and those are the people who will control the 2012 primaries in places like Iowa and South Carolina. Which suggests a Huckabee-Romney face-off in three years.

Guys like Pawlenty and Santorum have been auditioning to be the “great white hope” for the Bible-beater Republicans, but they have failed to make the sale.

The trick for Huckabee is to shift from his social-conservative emphasis toward the sort of fiscal conservatism which (a) will cut into Romney's support and (b) will attract the GOP army of crazed anti-tax anti-gummint teabaggers.

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