Wednesday, May 06, 2015

Will Huckabee go anywhere?

Former Arkansas Governor and more recently Fox News host Mike Huckabee announced his candidacy for the GOP nomination this week. Alan Greenblatt writes at Politico that Huckabee
governed Arkansas for more than a decade as a pragmatist, devoting his attention to basics such as roads, schools and health care.
Read more here about Huckabee's record in Arkansas.

A much less favorable article about Huckabee has been written by Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner. He shows how Huckabee won the evangelical vote in Iowa in 2008, but this time around
A number of candidates have a credible pitch to offer evangelical voters, including but not limited to Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal. Walker in particular has an appeal to the sort of working class populist vote that Huckabee tapped into. If John Kasich runs, he'll further carve up the so-called compassionate conservative vote to the extent it exists.

Huckabee won eight states in 2008, and
white evangelicals made up a third or more of the overall population in six of them (Tennessee, Alabama, West Virginia, Arkansas, Kansas and Georgia). But this understates things, because the percentage of born-again or evangelical Christians in the Republican primaries are higher. In the two states he won where the overall evangelical population was below a third, evangelicals made up 60 percent (Iowa) and half (Louisiana) of the electorate.

And, remember Dukakis's Willie Horton problem? Klein writes,
Over the course of his 10 and a half years as governor, Huckabee granted a staggering 1,033 clemencies, according to the Associated Press.
Read more here.

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