Huckabee Watch

During this week’s republican debate in Iowa, Mitt Romney introduced an intriguing model:

We’re not going to get the White House nor strengthen America unless we can pull together the coalition of conservatives and conservative thought that has made us successful as a party. And that’s social conservatives. It’s also economic conservatives. And foreign policy and defense conservatives.

Those three together form the three legs of the Republican stool that allowed Ronald Reagan to get elected and allowed our party to have strength over the last several decades.

Adopting Romney’s construction, we have three distinct stakeholders participating in the Republican nomination: Social conservatives, Economic conservatives, and Defense conservatives.

Clearly, Huckabee is enjoying strong support from the social conservative “leg” of Romney’s stool. He has either achieved — or is on his way to achieving — a plurality in every poll taken about the GOP nomination; meanwhile, his four other “viable” (McCain, Thompson, Romney, Giuliani) opponents have lost grip on the social conservative leg and are jockeying for the other two legs.

Romney’s model might suggest a balance of ideological influence by the three distinct stakeholders under the “Conservative” umbrella, but Huckabee reminds us that when it comes to electoral influence, social conservatives make Romney’s stool uncomfortably wobbly for the Defense/Economic conservatives.

The Defense/Economic conservatives have always had more influence and bigger megaphones. They have well-funded, palatial think tanks (with a quota of cubicles for their kooky cousins, the social conservatives), book publishing companies, newspapers, and magazines. They have Rupert Murdock on speed dial.

None of that is important to Huckabee, though. He’s got the numbers.

We’re seeing this paradox playing out right now: as the press on Huckabee gets louder and nastier (mostly from the Right), Huckabee’s poll numbers go higher and higher. This phenomenon (worse press = better numbers) will become even more incongruous over the next two weeks, and it will pave Huckabee’s way to becoming the republican nominee.