Watching the rise of Huckabee these past few weeks, I've been amazed by just how amazed people seem to be at what's happening. On the right, establishment conservatives have reacted with a mix of fear and panic, shocked to learn that the religious voters they've been using to get establishment conservatives elected these past few decades might actually decide to try to turn their political beliefs into reality. On the left, progressive bloggers have looked on with a mix of shock and awe as religious conservatives moved en masse to back a candidate who almost perfectly reflects everything prog-bloggers hate about the right. And in both camps, there has been a shared assumption that now matter how much he might surge, he'll never actually pull off a victory because his campaign is almost entirely lacking in staff and organization.
None of these reaction make any sense to me, because when you get down to it, both sides are acting as if they are surprised that the religious right might both mean what they say and say what they mean. It's as if people got so used to their religious right's leaders being hypocrites that they forgot that their followers might actually be genuine.
As much as these individual reactions have baffled me, its the shared reaction that's really got me lost. Huckabee doesn't have his own campaign organization? So what? With evangelicals behind him, he doesn't need one. I'll let Publius explain why:
Politically speaking, the great thing about social conservatives is that they come to politics already organized. Long before any candidates start organizing precincts, these people belong to churches, youth groups, choirs, etc. – i.e., permanent organizations with a great deal of trust and adhesion. For instance, if a few respected people within an Iowa Baptist church get excited about Huckabee, it’s easier to get the rest of congregation on board as well. And if these people have neighbors who attend a different church – e.g., the Methodist church down the street – well, you could see how Huck Mania could spread virally within a given religious community.
Bottom line, it’s much easier to take advantage of pre-existing infrastructure than to construct it yourself. And that’s what Huckabee seems to be doing. If he can solidify this support, it could continue delivering solid pluralities so long as multiple candidates remain in the race splitting the non-evangelical vote.
People have long taken for granted that the evangelical network has been a key element of Republican electoral success since the 1980s. Perhaps what was less clear to most people, and what is driving so much of the confusion today, is that this network existed separate and apart from the Republican Party itself. The two were very closely aligned, but they were always separate, and although they looked for many years (perhaps even decades) to be attached at the hip, that wasn't and isn't necessarily the case.
What makes the separation so much more obvious this time around, you ask? The answer, it seems to me, comes in two parts. First is the fact that the Republican primary process this time around is much more competitive than any we've seen since the rise of the religious right. There wasn't an early and obvious front-runner, which left the evangelical network up for grabs. And second, among the frontrunners that did emerge early on, none were acceptable to the religious right. I mean, sure, they may have at times pretended like their movement was OK with Romney, but what they were really doing was trying to talk themselves into supporting the man. At bottom, that's really what Fred Thompson's surge-and-decline was about; they were looking, searching, hoping, and - yes! - praying that a better man might emerge. And that's why from the beginning, I always figured it was only a matter of time before Huckabee caught on. If he could raise enough money to put himself in front of enough evangelical crowds, I always figured their pre-existing network would take care of the rest.
Now I must admit, if you had asked me to make a prediction about timing, I would have suggested the Huckabee surge would have happened months ago. But looking back, I realize that was all self-projection. I'm obsessed with politics, so I always over-estimate the level of interest other people have in following it, and nowhere is that more true than with elections. So when Huckabee didn't surge in the fall, I started to think maybe my understanding of the religious right was off. It was, but not in the way I suspected. It wasn't that they were rejecting Huckabee; it's that they hadn't even begun to consider him!
In the end, Huckabee's lack of a traditional campaign structure may actually be a blessing in disguise. Rather than waste time and money building his own network, he can simply co-opt the one evangelicals spent the last 30 years building. His message is quite literally their message, so the risk of something getting lost in translation is somewhere between zero and none. He is, I would argue, the perfect candidate for their movement. And if that's true, and if I am right, what that really means is that this election is going to be a true measure of the power of the religious right. They believe they have the numbers to build a governing majority. I've long thought they had no more than 25%. I guess we may be about to find out who is right!
Subscribe to this blog's feed
