Last night's Last night's exit polls showed Mitt Romney barely edging out Mike Huckabee in cornering the evangelical vote, 34-29%. About 40% of the Republican electorate in Michigan self-identifies as born-again or evangelical, but as I've argued before, not all of them hate Mormons, not all of them are as staunchly conservative as Huckabee on church-state separation, abortion, and gay marriage, and some of them, in Michigan's open primary might have even been Democrats! (The exit polling doesn't ask Democrats if they are born-again or evangelical.) As they head into South Carolina, however, the Republican candidates face a very different evangelical voter than than in Michigan. The Palmetto State is heavily Southern Baptist (Huckabee's denomination) and support for him among those voters runs high. Yesterday I chatted with Fred Astin, who works for the Beaverdam Baptist Association, a coalition of 70 Southern Baptist churches located in Seneca, South Carolina. Astin, who attended the November Pastors' Policy Briefing sponsored by the South Carolina Renewal Project, at which Huckabee spoke, said that support for Huckabee at that event and among Southern Baptists in general is extremely strong. Not so much for Romney, or for Fred Thompson, whose effort to emerge from obscurity in South Carolina seems rooted in his support among anti-choice advocacy groups. Another fascinating (to me, at least) feature of the Michigan exit polls is Huckabee's greater support than Romney's among voters who attend church more than once a week. Among voters who attend church once a week or less frequently, Romney beat Huckabee. But among those who attend more than once a week, Huckabee edged out Romney by four points. And John McCain won those voters who never attend church by a pretty hefty margin (39% to Romney's 28% to Huckabee's 7%). All of this is a long way of saying that Huckabee draws his strongest support from the most strident religiously-motivated voters, ones for whom church is so central to their own private lives that his advocacy for its infusion into the public square is not counter-intuitive or disturbing. That may not win him the nomination or the presidency, but he represents a sizable movement that's so dedicated to the cause that his loss will likely be proof to them that they need to redouble their efforts to get a candidate like him elected. --Sarah Posner
