Huckabee Campaign Post-Mortem

Last night, Mike Huckabee lost the Texas and Ohio primaries, McCain picked up the number of delegates he needed to secure the nomination, so Huckabee graciously conceded and promised to support McCain in the continuing race for the White House. It was an exciting race for several months, but now it is over.

Having spent several months on the inside of the grassroots effort for Huckabee, here is my post-mortem analysis:

It is remarkable that Huckabee got as far as he did. He had no backing from the GOP political establishment, and thus very little money, and a lot of snarky sentiment and hyperbolic criticism directed at him from the opinion leaders and political kingmakers who thought he had no right to be where he was without their anointing. Despite being first ignored and later attacked by the GOP establishment, and despite having negligible resources to get his message out, Huckabee consistently won over roughly 1/3 of GOP voters in the primaries. His ability to win hearts and minds with nothing more than good stump speeches and earned media is truly remarkable.

The downfall of the campaign was failing to reach non-Evangelical voters. As I've said many times on this blog, Huckabee's positions on domestic issues such as economics, conservation, and education are very attractive to Catholics and people of any religious stripe who believe in striving for good, balanced government (as opposed to believing government should do everything for us or government is always bad). This ought to have made Huckabee competitive with the same moderate/swing voters that McCain is hoping to win over. But most of these people never really learned about Huckabee's positions on these issues, because he was stuck in the Evangelical box. In fact, polls suggest he bombed badly with Catholics, who saw him as an Evangelical firebrand instead of a politician fighting for their values.

At least part of the reason this happened, and I hope the main reason, is that Huckabee had to rely on the Evangelical grassroots network to do so much for his campaign because he couldn't afford to have a real campaign organization. Inevitably, the foot soldiers in Huck's Army included enough religious partisans who made comments that were hostile or bizarre to non-Evangelicals to scare many others away. There were a lot of activist Huckabee supporters out there talking about Mike Huckabee as if he were anointed by God to be our political leader, and some of them going so far as talking in prophetic or apocalyptic terms. News flash, folks: we don't live in Ancient Israel. Our political leaders are elected by the free will of the people, so talk about God choosing a political leaders only brings those politicians down.

Now every candidate has some embarrassing supporters. But to be successful in the general population, they have to gently but effectively distance themselves from these people (like McCain distancing himself from Bill Cunningham's below-the-belt attacks on Obama recently, which was not a "slap at conservatives" as Cunningham complained, but smart politics). Unfortunately, Huckabee was not effective at distancing himself from those Evangelical supporters who were an embarrassment because he was too dependent on their free labor and/or had no organization to supplant them. To do better next time, he needs a stronger organization of his own so he can marginalize wacky supporters.

Huckabee also failed to focus his outreach on non-Evangelical groups. It was evident by January or maybe even December that he had the Evangelicals firmly in his camp, so he should have refocused his message on other groups at that point. Unfortunately, he made no concerted effort to reach out to Catholics or moderates. Again, I think a lot of this was driven by desperation for money and volunteers, and Evangelical audiences were low-hanging fruit for these purposes. I hope that it wasn't a lack of interest in reaching out to non-Evangelicals. If Huckabee is to have any shot at the Presidency in the future, he needs to tap the Evangelicals for funds quickly and then, knowing he has already won them over, use those funds to get his message to everyone else. Fewer Sundays before key primaries preaching to Evangelical congregations; more Mondays talking to think tanks, Fridays playing venues with Capitol Offense, and Saturdays appearing at Catholic pro-life and charitable organizations.

To have a shot at going all the way, you need a real organization. When I first got involved with the Huckabee campaign, Washington insiders told me he had no shot because he had no organization and money. I hoped he would be able to acquire those things as his popularity grew, and the same Washington insiders were truly shocked and admired how far Huckabee got without them. But when the local primaries rolled around, I realized how impossible the task was without a traditional political organization. My representative to the Virginia legislature had far more resources to run her campaign for a district of at most 100 square miles than Huckabee had to run a statewide campaign. It was complete chaos in the week before the primary as hundreds of willing volunteers with NO direction or assistance from the official campaign tried to figure out how to get yard signs, what kind of literature to hand out, where to focus their efforts, etc. Their efforts were sacrificial and valiant, and Huckabee did manage to come within single digits of McCain in Virginia. But there was a lot of frustration among the volunteers because no one knew who was in charge. And these volunteers could have done so much more if there was a real organization in place that could have planned ahead and assigned resources where they would be most effective.

Again, for Huckabee to have a real chance at winning the Presidency in a future election, he needs to gather up more resources at the start and then set up a more conventional political organization in key states. We volunteers like Mike, but having realized that an unorganized campaign is a Sisyphean effort, we're not willing to climb that mountain again without the proper gear next time.

Well, that's all folks! Here's hoping for the VP nod and 2012!

Signing off until then,
The K Street Mole for Huckabee