Although most observers viewed Mike Huckabee as John McCain's errand boy in siphoning evangelical votes away from Mitt Romney, Huckabee emerged from Super Tuesday as McCain's foremost prospect for a running mate. While Huckabee is still behind both McCain and Romney in the delegate count, he came out looking more viable than Romney because of his victories in Republican strongholds like Georgia and Alabama, in Tennessee and his home state of Arkansas, all essential states for a Republican to win in November. Although the Huckabee campaign's signs of life are limited to the Bible Belt, that is exactly where McCain would need a boost from Huckabee's networks of fervent believers, especially in states like Missouri, where McCain eked out a victory, but where the Democratic turnout outpaced the Republicans'. Other upcoming primary states where Huckabee could show well -- particularly if Romney drops out -- include Louisiana, Kansas, Texas, and Kentucky. Huckabee was hardly the hands-down favorite among evangelical voters, who split their votes between the three Republican candidates. As I discussed last week, though, and as even more new polling shows, the Republicans can no longer claim a monopoly on evangelical voters, but it's hard to measure the true breadth of the Democratic evangelical vote because the exit pollsters still aren't asking Democrats if they're evangelical. While McCain has been drawing part of the evangelical vote, he would still need the hardcore of the conservative Republican evangelicals who are responsive to the movement's get-out-the-vote machinery and pastors' networks to compete in November. Huckabee, who compared himself to David slaying the mighty Goliath in a speech to supporters last night in Little Rock, demonstrated the resiliency of that machinery by pulling out victories in spite of Romney's financial dominance and McCain's post-Florida ascendancy to front-runner status. It will be interesting to watch and see, in the coming weeks, whether the religious right leaders start to coalesce around Huckabee, something many of them have resisted for months, in order to put pressure on McCain, who many of them still view with suspicion. Surely any rallying around McCain would be accompanied by pressure on him to pledge fealty to their core issues, especially a federal gay marriage amendment and judicial nominations. If McCain makes amends with the old guard -- people like James Dobson and the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land -- and they also see Huckabee as a viable running mate, McCain could draw together different strands of the Republican-leaning evangelical vote. In my mind, they fall into three categories: moderate to conservative evangelicals who don't wait for marching orders from Dobson et al.; biblical conservatives moved by Huckabee's expressed commitment to the Christian nation mythology; and the "new kind" of evangelical I discussed last week, who share many of the movement's core beliefs, but reject its vitriolic rhetoric. Although the "new evangelical" is still a bit of an enigma -- how can Huckabee, for example, cavort with Tim LaHaye and John Hagee but still claim to reject that vitriol -- Huckabee has crossover appeal among all those groups. Read more in this week's FundamentaList. --Sarah Posner
