Former Baptist preacher turned presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has been successful in infusing passion and life back into once apathetic evangelical voters. But the question remains whether he can broaden his appeal to moderate Republicans and, in general, to the American public to win the race to the White House.
A current problem facing the Huckabee campaign is how to attract other Republican constituencies beyond anti-abortion, anti-gay “marriage” social conservatives. Among his problems is the strong opposition from fiscal conservatives – important members of the Republican Party - who charge him with raising taxes as Arkansas governor.
In a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll, Huckabee was shown to face an uphill battle in winning the general election. The national survey found that 52 percent of those polled said they would definitely not vote for Huckabee. His favorability rating was just 38 percent, compared to Sen. John McCain’s 54 percent positive rating.
Huckabee may be the favorite candidate of Democrats because they believe they can beat him with anyone of their candidates. They may be able to sway enough votes to do just that.
So far, however, Huckabee is still almost exclusively seen as the evangelical Christian candidate. Most of his support in Iowa and New Hampshire had come from that voting group.
While some follow him as a pseudo Christian pied piper, I prefer to look a bit beyond my nose and I don't consider Huckabee (regardless of his faith) the man for the job.
2 comments:
Short answer: No. Not in significent numbers.
Huckabee's appeal to evangelicals is more than a little offputing to everyone else. He looks like he is manipulating people - getting them to vote for him because he is a devout christian, rather than because he would be a good president. He spends almost all of his campaigning effort on issues that matter a great deal to social conservatives - abortion, gay marriage - but spends so much time on those that he doesn't say much regarding less headline-grabbing subjects. He is usually seen as the most Bush-like of the candidates... and Bush's approval rating is in the region of 30% and falling so the association is quite a handycap.
Personally, I support Huckabee NOT because he is an evangelical, but rather because of his overall solid conservative credentials, which have been smeared, twisted, and completely misrepresented by Limbaugh, Quinn, and their ilk.
And no, Huckabee is not the favorite candidate of the Dems. In fact, most of the hard core libs I've run across, well, he has them shaking in their birkenstocks, as they believe he is the ONE candidate who can topple Clinton or Obama this November.
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