Washington Briefing a Resounding Success!

I just got home an hour ago from the Washington Briefing. This event was a resounding success! Thanks so much to everyone who came, everyone who voted online, and everyone who prayed for Mike Huckabee.

You may have already seen the results of the straw poll - Romney narrowly edged out Huckabee by 0.5% of overall vote - after sending emails to supporters nationwide yesterday telling them to vote online. But Huckabee beat Romney by a 5 to 1 margin among onsite voters, and won 51% of the vote with 9 Republicans on the ballot (and the Democrats too, but this isn't really "their crowd," shall we say).

You also may have read the summary of Huckabee's speech posted by Erick at Redstate and reposted on the Huckabee website. I think this is quite accurate, but want to add a couple points:

• The crowd who went nuts at the beginning and wouldn't stop cheering weren't Arkansas folks. They were Huckabee supporters from all over the country. In fact, I didn't meet a single Huckabee supporter from Arkansas there! (Not that there weren't any, but no one I talked with and asked where they were from said Arkansas.)
• Huckabee got more standing ovations than all of the other Presidential candidates combined! Most of the others got one or two, at best. Huckabee's speech was interrupted by standing ovations so many times that the supporter next to me quipped we were practicing for Huckabee's first State of the Union address.
• Mike's mention of Jesus raising Lazarus was near the end of a litany of Biblical examples of the underdog winning or the impossible happening by the power of God. He started saying that his upbringing taught him that he'd rather be David than Goliath, a good reference to his position right now in terms of fundraising versus real strength as a candidate.

The energy on the ground there was amazing. Yesterday the Huckabee supporters who had coordinated online were handing out pins to people who saw ours and asked for them, and quickly ran out of the 50 or so we had. We were the only ones with a real grassroots there. Thompson brought an entourage that handed out stuff for an hour or two before he spoke, and quickly disappeared afterwards. Romney brought a much bigger entourage yesterday evening, but again, there were only a handful of Romney supporters there the rest of the time. We were all over the floor and growing every hour. Janet Folger was pigeonholing all the big-wigs and handing out color graphs of Huckabee's 63% win at the Value Voters debate in Florida a month ago. Three Huckabee supporters sharing a hotel room stayed up into the wee hours Friday night to put together an excellent flier in support of Huckabee that they handed out to conference-goers as they entered early Saturday morning. Huckabee inspires so much energy from his supporters, I think that alone might be the answer to energy independence. :)

After the speech, Huckabee met for little while with bloggers and other supporters and did a Q&A session, before moving on to the official media meeting. One question was about the difficulty he has had in getting leaders of his own faith to support him. Mike said that the problem was that these leaders seemed to think their job is to handicap the horserace. He said "you should be backing the horse you have, and feeding it." Several people wrote checks on the spot.

This was a great, great day for the Huckabee campaign. Thanks again for everyone who contributed their time, prayers, and votes!

A final important point: after this weekend, Fred Thompson is toast. He is in the race only to be an "electable other" for social conservatives instead of Romney. The social conservatives have spoken: Thompson is a dud. He received only 8% of the onsite vote; and only 10% overall--i.e. including people who didn't see him speak and compare with the other candidates. Many people who had walked into the event leaning or even supporting Thompson left supporting Huckabee. If Thompson bores the conservative base and his share of their votes sits in the cellar, he has no purpose in this campaign.

It's really clear now: there are only two possibilities for the social conservatives to coalesce around to make sure that Rudy Giuliani does not hijack the GOP with a minority faction. Romney or Huckabee. Will the opinion leaders of the conservatives focus on Romney's narrow win of a straw poll with virtually no checks against bias, his big warchest, and his saying all the right things to the value voters, even if the crowd is skeptical and feels pandered to? Or will they focus on Huckabee's gathering momentum, the fact he has won a clear majority in a straw poll of values voters where all the GOP candidates had 15-20 minutes to air their positions, and the fact he energizes the crowd and grassroots far more than any other candidate?

Pray, pray hard that it is the latter. We're with David!