A Vote For Huckabee Is A Vote Against McCain (As It Always Has Been)
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I took the “Huckabee will drop out once Romney does” view a couple weeks ago, which was obviously wrong, so I have completely missed what Huckabee has been trying to accomplish. He is trying to rack up more delegates to become the candidate with the second-most delegates overall, but I think there is an impulse behind “giving the people a choice” that makes Huckabee and his campaign want to test the proposition of whether McCain can, in fact, win the nomination outright through contested primaries. This isn’t just a way for Huckabee to gain status and prominence in the party, but possibly a way to try to deny McCain some of the 352 delegates he still needs. It is very unlikely that Huckabee will succeed even in this blocking maneuver, but if there continues to be a strong backlash against McCain it is possible that he could fall short of the required number. Through March 4, McCain cannot acquire as many delegates as he needs to end it (only 305 are at stake in Wisconsin and the March 4 states), so Huckabee can keep prolonging it after that for the sake of prolonging it and testing McCain’s ability to win in many of these other states in the Midwest and the South. That requires him to win Texas and probably a couple other states as well, or else McCain will wrap things up very quickly after that regardless. After March 4, except for the territorial and Puerto Rico votes, things theoretically become more more favourable for an anti-McCain effort: Mississippi, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Idaho are all likely to be good states for Huckabee, and Pennsylvania has a strong contingent of Christian conservatives as well. Huckabee cannot win, but it is still conceivable that McCain might still not win. For this to happen, obviously it would require over a dozen states to choose Huckabee knowing full well that he will not be the nominee. Maybe the convention then chooses McCain anyway in exchange for concessions and pledges that he makes on the platform and on policy, or maybe it is thrown to someone else.
Huckabee offers the anti-McCain forces an ideal champion in one sense: whether or not you actually like him or his views, he truly cannot become the nominee now no matter how many primaries and caucuses he wins, so supporting him is simply a way to express dissatisfaction with McCain. Romney was a poor figure to rally around, since there was always the unpleasant reality that he might actually win the nomination. The virtue of Huckabee’s resistance is the impossibility of his ultimate victory.
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[...] My view of Huckabee’s goals is here. On the Virginia primary, Huckabee prevailed overwhelmingly in all the parts of the state where you would expect him to do well, and he even had some respectable showings in eastern Virginia where McCain was supposed to be strongest. The trouble is that most Virginians don’t live in the places where Huckabee thrives–as in South Carolina, McCain succeeded in the regions with the most transplants from outside the state, while Huckabee prevailed with the native-born Southerners. Huckabee’s apparent limitations electorally (he is the rural, Christian conservative candidate) were on display on Tuesday, as he could scarcely win any major urban areas except those, such as Roanoke and Lynchburg, where his natural constituencies were very large. He was shut out of the eastern coastal cities, Richmond and the Washington suburbs, just as you might expect the perceived ”very conservative” candidate to be. The good news for Huckabee is that there will be many states that fit his ideal profile in the next few months, which could give him enough support to prevent McCain from winning outright. The bad news is that most of them are in April and May. [...]