Mike Huckabee thinks he has Iowa evangelicals locked down. He’s wrong. [CRUZ]

national journal ^ | Tim Alberta

[SoConPubbie]

Just as Ted Cruz was electrifying Iowa's right-wing activists in Des Moines with a call for America's rebirth, Mike Huckabee's team was erecting a display of free books in the hall outside.

Cruz's time was running short. A few more speakers and then Huckabee, another crowd favorite, would be up. So the Texan ended his fiery speech with a request: Conservatives who wanted to join his "grassroots army" should text "Constitution" to a special phone number. It was a smart stunt. The Freedom Summit auditorium sparkled with LED screens, giving Cruz, his adviser brags, more than 1,000 Iowa phone numbers for less than 30 seconds of work.

Huckabee wanted to make those connections, too. For more than 90 minutes, his team circled the book display with clipboards and pens, asking for activists' contact information. Some attendees obliged; many others hurried by. The clipboards just couldn't keep pace.

This is what Huckabee is up against. The former Arkansas governor who came from nowhere to win Iowa's 2008 Republican caucuses remains immensely popular in the state. He connects on personal and spiritual levels in evangelical-heavy Iowa, and social conservatives in this state have adopted him as one of their own. Huckabee's team is counting on that loyalty as he prepares to launch a second presidential campaign.

But things have changed since Huckabee's last campaign here. Not only have the operational tactics evolved—as demonstrated by Cruz's efficient data-collection strategy—but the race to win religious voters has also become crowded. Whereas Huckabee in 2008 faced little competition in wooing socially conservative caucus-goers, this time around, more than a half dozen viable candidates will target that critical subset of the Iowa electorate.

This means trouble for Huckabee. The last time he won an election was 2002, before Facebook, before Twitter. Before Instagram, Snapchat, and iPhones. The last time he won the caucuses, in 2008, the tea-party movement did not exist. He'll now face a more conservative field, one that's younger, tech-savvy, and already aggressively reaching for his core supporters. And while Huckabee can still sell books, it's not clear that he can still sell himself.

“Huckabee’s 2008 supporters are not locked up, and it’s not because they’re all staying with Santorum,” says Greg Baker, a Santorum 2012 supporter who is the political director at the Iowa Family Leader.

"We need some new, young blood in the party," says Patricia Hatfield, standing outside Books-A-Million in Ames, where Huckabee has just signed copies of his new manifesto, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy.

Hatfield and her husband, Jerry, are precisely the kind of people Huckabee can't afford to lose. They are self-identified evangelicals who supported Huckabee in 2008, and, when he decided not to run in 2012, they helped former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania win the Iowa caucuses. The Hatfields are active in state politics, and they adore Huckabee personally. But they are ready for something new. "Eight years," Jerry Hatfield says, remembering Huckabee's 2008 campaign, "is a long time."

This sentiment echoes resoundingly among caucus-goers here. Recent interviews with more than a dozen former Huckabee supporters yielded only a single ironclad commitment to back him again in 2016. Explanations were straightforward: The country is changing, the party is changing, and campaigns are changing. 2016, they say, will look nothing like 2008. The ground has shifted beneath Huckabee's feet.

But Huckabee's team doesn't buy it. For months, staffers have laid the groundwork for another campaign—and have done so under the pretense that things haven't changed in Iowa. That Huckabee still connects distinctively with social conservatives. That his message still resonates uniquely with Republican voters. And that no other candidate will compete with him for the affections of the evangelical base. "When it comes to rallying social conservatives, Ted Cruz doesn't hold a candle to Mike Huckabee," the former governor's spokeswoman, Alice Stewart, told National Journal late last year.

That theory is about to be tested. Cruz leads a large pack of conservative White House contenders aiming their campaign operations straight at evangelicals, the heart of the Iowa Republican electorate. In recent presidential cycles, they have coalesced behind one candidate. In 2012, that was Santorum, adopted by Huckabee's 2008 supporters as the antiestablishment vessel (after flings with Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann). This time around, Iowa faces an unprecedented situation: two former winners competing in the first-in-the-nation caucuses.

But, here again, Huckabee's team is dismissive. One senior Huckabee adviser, describing the conversations within his camp, puts it thusly: "Santorum rented Iowa. Huckabee owns it."

In this case, Team Huckabee's hubris is justifiable. Santorum still has a presence throughout the state, thanks to his Patriot Voices super PAC and affiliated nonprofit. But many of his top Iowa officials from 2012 have moved on. One of them, speaking on condition of anonymity because of their personal friendship, says Santorum "was just the last man standing" against Mitt Romney in 2012. If loyalty is an issue for Huckabee heading into his second run, Iowa Republicans say, it's even more problematic for Santorum.

"Huckabee's 2008 supporters are not locked up, and it's not because they're all staying with Santorum," says Greg Baker, a Santorum 2012 supporter who is the political director at the Iowa Family Leader.

Indeed, Santorum should be the least of Team Huckabee's concerns this time around. A new cast of characters, many of them fresh-faced and allied with the grassroots, are working hard to make inroads with evangelicals.

Certainly, there's Cruz, who has been reaching out to Christian leaders for advice on hiring a state director to run his Iowa operation. But the list also includes Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who recently hired top Iowa strategist David Polyansky, the man credited with orchestrating Huckabee's 2008 caucus triumph; Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose top Iowa adviser, Bob Haus, is highly respected in social-conservative circles; Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who missed the Freedom Summit because he was hosting a day of prayer in his home state; and neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who recently tapped Ryan Rhodes, chairman of the Iowa Tea Party and a well-connected evangelical, to run his Iowa operation.

"It's a good problem to have for Christian conservatives," says Jamie Johnson, a leading evangelical organizer and member of the Iowa GOP's state Central Committee.

Steve Scheffler, president of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition and the state's GOP national committeeman, says the race to become the consensus evangelical favorite is "wide open." But he warns that while several candidates are already connecting with religious voters, he's waiting to see who actually puts together a functional campaign. "You might have the right message and energy, but you have to have an organization to turn people out. And that's not easy."

It may be premature to appraise campaign organizations, but there is a pervasive sense on the ground that Carson isn't built to last. The soft-spoken outsider has generated large crowds, and there is plenty of talk about how his campaign presence spans all of Iowa's 99 counties. But Carson's support, one unaffiliated conservative leader emphasizes, is "a mile wide and an inch deep." In fact, two neutral Republican officials, in separate interviews, noted that one of Carson's county chairs is elderly, infirm, and rarely leaves the house.

So, who has both the conservative bona fides and the organizational muscle needed to win Iowa? Influential Republicans here suspect the field will boil down to Walker and Cruz.

The son of a Baptist minister, Walker spent a chunk of his childhood in rural Iowa before moving to neighboring Wisconsin. He often spoke from his father's pulpit on Sunday mornings, and he took his faith so seriously that friends expected him to become a minister. This religious and cultural authenticity has helped Walker woo voters in Wisconsin, and his campaign hopes it will help him gain a foothold in Iowa. He opened his Freedom Summit speech by advocating the power of prayer—a message that was appreciated by top evangelical leaders, including some influential church pastors, in attendance.

Cruz, on the other hand, has made no top-level hires in Iowa. But he has spent significant time in the state over the past two years. So has his father, Pastor Rafael Cruz, who draws crowds that could rival any other candidate's.

[SoConPubbie]

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[gov_bean_ counter]

No problem. Just glad to have been added. Thanks!!!

[stuck_in_new_orleans]

Huckafool is delusional if he thinks he has a shot

[HereInTheHeartland]

I’m in Iowa and somewhat active in this stuff. I don’t know of anyone who is supporting Huckabee; he isn’t viewed as a serious candidate in my eyes.

People want a conservative candidate who can win.

[csivils]

Keep up the good work!