In 2008, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee surprised many Beltway pundits by coming out of nowhere on a shoestring budget to win the Iowa caucuses and finish as the runner-up to eventual nominee John McCain in the delegate count. Wary of underestimating Huckabee a second time, we’re starting to see more punditry cautioning against writing off his chances. My friend Matt Lewis has the latest column of this genre. Though I wouldn’t dismiss Huckabee’s ability to affect the race by further carving up the evangelical vote, I’d caution against overrating his chances. Here are the reasons why his 2016 campaign is likely to be a bust.
We aren’t in 2008 anymore
For much of 2007, the candidates seen as frontrunners for the nomination left evangelicals cold. There was McCain, the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani, the pro-choice-for-two-seconds before he launched his candidacy Mitt Romney, and for a short time, the lackluster Fred Thompson. Within this environment, by late 2007, evangelicals asked themselves why they should settle for one of these anointed candidates rather than choose one of their own — so they rallied around Huckabee.
But these conditions don’t apply this time around. A number of candidates have a credible pitch to offer evangelical voters, including but not limited to Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal. Walker in particular has an appeal to the sort of working class populist vote that Huckabee tapped into. If John Kasich runs, he’ll further carve up the so-called compassionate conservative vote to the extent it exists.
Even if Huckabee equals his 2008 performance, he won’t build on it
Should Huckabee match his performance from 2008, he will certainly make life more difficult for conservative candidates, as Washington Examiner’s Susan Ferrechio reports. But it’s hard to see how he improves on 2008.
Back then, there was a very clear way of determining whether Huckabee could be competitive in a nominating contest — all you had to do was look at the evangelical population in the states. Where there was a critical mass of evangelical voters, Huckabee could do well. Where there wasn’t, he didn’t stand a chance. In fact, of the eight states that Huckabee won, white evangelicals made up a third or more of the overall population in six of them (Tennessee, Alabama, West Virginia, Arkansas, Kansas and Georgia). But this understates things, because the percentage of born-again or evangelical Christians in the Republican primaries are higher. In the two states he won where the overall evangelical population was below a third, evangelicals made up 60 percent (Iowa) and half (Louisiana) of the electorate.
It’s hard to see how Huckabee improves on this performance. He still remains as objectionable to economic conservatives given his tax and spending record in Arkansas, opposition to free trade and recent aversion to entitlement reform. Only this time around, limited government social conservatives can find other candidates who share their social views without having to swallow Huckabee’s big government positions.
At the same time, he doesn’t have any bona fides on national security that would make him stand out. Back in 2008, he joked at one point, “I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.” Though he may have taken more foreign policy trips since then and could approach national security issues more seriously, it’s difficult to see what he could offer in terms of bona fides that would be more impressive than other viable socially and economically conservative candidates.
Maurice Clemmons
As Huckabee gained traction in 2007, it led to increased scrutiny of his record of granting pardons and commutations as governor. As I noted at the time:
Over the course of his 10 and a half years as governor, Huckabee granted a staggering 1,033 clemencies, according to the Associated Press. That was more than double the combined 507 that were granted during the 17 and a half years of his three predecessors: Bill Clinton, Frank White, and Jim Guy Tucker.
In many cases, Huckabee’s actions set loose savage criminals convicted of grisly murders over the passionate objections of prosecutors and victims’ families.
But one thing has changed dramatically since then: In 2009, Maurice Clemmons, who Huckabee freed from a 108-year jail sentence, assassinated four Lakewood, Washington police officers. Though Huckabee has defended himself, his defenses have fallen short. As the Seattle Times’ Jonathan Martin recounted:
As part of a book on the Maurice Clemmons case I co-wrote with Seattle Times reporter Ken Armstrong, I spent a week in Little Rock peeling back Huckabee’s handling of the case. As we detailed in “The Other Side of Mercy: A Killer’s Journey Across the American Divide,” Huckabee viewed clemency as a means to right the wrongs of Arkansas’ racial history. A fine goal, but he failed use it wisely. He did not do the basics with Clemmons – such as contacting the prosecuting attorney for comment – or assuring that Clemmons’ release plan – to move to Seattle – was solid, or even factual (it was neither).
In fact, it doesn’t appear Huckabee even checked out Clemmons’ prison file, which was thick with acts of violence and absent indications of rehabilitation.
Martin also quoted this from his book:
In years to come Huckabee would be asked how much he knew about Clemmons’ prison history while weighing his request. Huckabee would tell CNN: “I read the entire file … It was a file this thick … I looked at the file, every bit of it.”
Every bit of it? That seems unlikely. By 2000, Clemmons’ prison file already exceeded a thousand pages. But if Huckabee did read every bit of it, he would have seen a record—dated October 21, 1999—that boiled Clemmons’ stay in prison down to his damning score sheet:
Disciplinaries: Twenty-nine times
Achievements: None
In some sense if the Clemmons story becomes an important part of the 2016 campaign, it will be a good sign for Huckabee, because it will mean he’s gained enough steam to draw the scrutiny. But as the details get hashed out once again, it will act as a barrier to him winning over voters who aren’t already part of his core dedicated followers.
