The Mike Huckabee Effect

The conservative wing of the Republican party: divided they fell. And Mike Huckabee is to blame.

Mike Huckabee is just about everything that is wrong with American politics: the conflation of church and state, the deference to religion and ideology over logic, and the suspicion of facts. All in one package. But his effect on the Republican primary process – and the continuing repercussions that his candidacy has had on the John McCain campaign – might constitute a blessing in disguise for Democrats. Namely, Huckabee, by splitting the evangelical vote, prevented an evangelical/Bush-style Republican from winning the nomination, with the result that a disaffected wing of the Republican party still feels the need to cast protest ballots against McCain, in every primary in which he appears.

Let’s pause and reflect on the Republican primary (ed. note: I pull all my numbers from here).

This last year was a battle for the soul of the Republican party. If Reagan “realigned” the party towards a social & fiscal conservative mindset, Bush capitalized upon the social policy realignment, and brought it to its logical extreme, pulling evangelical Christians into the “tent” while pushing out the mainstream wing of the party. The result was an extremely partisan seven years, propelled by an energized single-issue (“Christian values”) bloc.

The question was, would the trend endure? The question was adequately posed by the juxtaposition of the relatively moderate John McCain with two candidates who sought to clothe themselves in evangelical robes (Mitt Romney and Mike Hucakbee). Faced with widespread dissatisfaction regarding the Republican Party’s management style, but perhaps lingering support for its rightwards social policies, which wing – evangelical or Reagan conservative – would win?

Oddly, the answer is “both, but none.” We all know that John McCain – a fairly secular Republican, openly hostile to many of the religious right’s positions – has all but won the party’s nomination. However, as the charts above demonstrate, the primary season incontrovertibly proved that the vast majority of the Republican party, except for in a few liberal states, wanted the evangelical bent of the Republican party to continue, and at most points in the Republican primary season, they registered this belief by casting more ballots for socially conservative candidates than for McCain. The problem, of course, was that the evangelical/social conservative vote was evenly split between Mitt Romney – who spoke routinely and frequently about social issues, won the endorsement of many figures of the religious right, and acted as an avatar of the movement on venues like the Rush Limbaugh Show – and Mike Huckabee. Without either one of them, the movement could have united its support behind the other, and potentially propelled the candidate to the nomination. However, since I do not think that the mainstream Republican party would have let Mike Huckabee get that close to power, and since Mitt Romney presented a (fairly) electable figure in his portrayal as an attractive & successful businessman and former state executive, I conclude that Mike Huckabee singlehandedly kept the socially conservative wing from dominating the Republican party, and allowed John McCain to leverage his moderate support and street name popularity against his weak initial showings to build himself a plurality, if never a majority.

The result of McCain’s nomination, against a strong wing of the party that could agree on nothing except that they did not want John McCain, is a candidate who consistently receives “protest votes” in uncontested primary elections (McCain won only 78% of the Republican ballots last night in Indiana!). This weakness and division among the Republican ranks may be used, as I have suggested before, by a shrewd Democratic party to keep home the “values voters” which propelled Mr. Bush, under Karl Rove’s guidance, to victory and to two of the worst presidential terms in history. At the very least, it spells the end of the energized & unified Republican base.

Alternately, however, the Democrats’ continuing division could put them in the same position as the conservative wing of the Republican party, and could lead to the election of John McCain, the president whom nobody wanted.

A coda: near the end of the ancient world, the Etruscan League, a coalition of city-states in southern Italy, faced the rise of expansionist Rome. When Veii – one of the twelve Etruscan city states – suffered invasion by the Roman Republic, rather than rally to its defense, the remaining eleven chose to stand idly by, letting old grudges get the better of their need for common defense & a unified front against the insurgent. Etruria payed the price: divided they fell. The oldest and most important lesson of human history is that unity is valuable and necessary. But as Etruria forgot it, so has the conservative/evangelical wing of the Republican party.

Hopefully to the benefit of all.

Update: a good post by a progressive conservative on coping with the religious right’s co-opting of the message.

Tags: Election 2008