Huckabee’s Catholic problem has just become much worse (via Ambinder):

Michigan Catholic Voter Alert:
What Michigan Catholics MUST Know About Mike Huckabee

 

FACT: Mike Huckabee has exhibited a willful blindness in associating with anti-Catholicism when it has benefited him politically.

FACT: Instead of supporting a healthy expression of religion in the public square, Mike Huckabee has used his evangelical protestant faith as a wedge to divide the Republican Party and gain support from fellow evangelicals.

FACT: While claiming to believe Catholics are fellow Christians, Mike Huckabee has kept close acquitance with evangelical leaders who have:

o Compared Catholicism to a disease requiring ‘recovery’ and rehabilitation;

o Said the Catholic Church collaborated with the Nazis to exterminate Jews;

o Accused the Catholic Church of pulling mankind into the ‘dark ages’.

FACT: Mike Huckabee has been endorsed by anti-Catholic author Tim Lahaye , who called Catholicism a “false religion” Lahaye’s Church also funded “Mission to Catholics”, a virulently anti-Catholic ministry.

And on it goes.  As near as I can tell, there is nothing in the email in question that is untrue.  The item also draws attention to Huckabee’s half-hearted response to an apparent anti-Catholic campaign aimed at undermining Brownback in Iowa, which soured relations between the two campaigns and marked the real kickoff of the religious dimension of the GOP nomination contest.  Frankly, besides Hagee’s anti-Catholicism, what worries me almost as much as about Hagee is the man’s role in founding CUFI and his insane cheerleading for the bombardment of Lebanon (which he called a “miracle from God”).  Unfortunately, that’s just the sort of association that should stand him in good stead with “national security” conservatives.

Query: why aren’t Catholic voters similarly put out by Romney’s acceptance of an endorsement from Bob Jones III?

Bearing in mind that head-to-head matchups ten months before Election Day are awfully unreliable guides to actual performance and also keeping in mind that electability arguments are fraught with danger, I nonetheless agree with this conclusion (via Sullivan):

With key primaries coming up in Michigan and South Carolina, support for Romney would seem to indicate a powerful and problematic Republican death wish.

This seems right to me, but not necessarily because Romney performs poorly in head-to-head general election scenarios.  Those sorts of polls have been coming out for months, and the lesser known candidates are always doing worse against the better-known celebrity candidates.  (Fred Thompson has the unfortunate distinction of being a celebrity candidate who is nonetheless surprisingly little known by name.)  It has been tempting to use them to bash Romney, but these polls actually show a lack of name recognition and familiarity with the weaker candidates.  Those of us who have been following this election for the past year may find it incredible that there is still someone who doesn’t know who Mitt Romney is (some of us envy those who have remained so blissfully ignorant), but we must remember that most people are not so foolish as to have wasted their time on election coverage throughout 2007.  If Mitt Romney is getting blown out by Barack Obama in a national poll, any number of factors might explain this that have nothing to do with how Romney would perform in a general election.  Media exposure, and positive media exposure at that, has to play a major role.  What the weak poll showing by Romney reflects is the bare minimum percentage of the population that can be counted to vote for the Republican candidate virtually no matter what.  Add a well-known quantity or a celebrity candidate, and you will get additional support on top of that–that does not necessarily reflect how well a candidate would do in the actual election.  The percentage of undecided voters in these match-ups is usually quite large, because most people haven’t the foggiest who Romney or Huckabee are.  Those who are choosing Romney or Huckabee in spite of knowing little or nothing about them are reliably Republican voters.  The undecided voters who still need more information represent the part of the electorate that is less committed to either party.   

Electability arguments are treacherous.  Let’s remember, if we can, those long-ago days when people were very proudly declaring that Giuliani was going to redraw the electoral map (New Jersey and Connecticut would be in play once more!) and be a very electable general election candidate.  He was supposed to be the Clinton-slayer, and you were supposed to bow before him because he was going to save you from Hillary.  He has been so electable that he currently has zero delegates, and is on pace to acquire none on Tuesday and perhaps a handful on Saturday.  Duncan Hunter has managed to acquire more delegates than Giuliani at this point.  One problem with electability arguments is that it assumes that the candidate can get to a point where such a trait matters. 

I would be wary of putting too much emphasis on general election polls that show McCain to be very competitive with named Democrats, since Giuliani performed well in similar polls, but I would also note that those who have pushed McCain’s electability have also assumed that he had a very difficult road to the nomination after the immigration fight last summer.  I am beginning to think that the latter assumption is the one that has been unexpectedly wrong, and it is instead McCain’s electability that we should question.  All things being equal, McCain ought to have a hard time getting the nomination.  Many conservative activists loathe the man almost as much as they loathe Huckabee.  Yet we seem to be seeing a divergence between what most activists have been saying and what at least a plurality of Republican voters actually prefer.  As of late last summer, the divided field was supposed to deliver the nomination to Giuliani.  In his place now stands McCain (his national polling and Giuliani’s have switched places almost exactly and, one assumes, exchanged  many supporters), who stands to benefit from the Romney-Huckabee war and the desultory sniping of Fred Thompson.  As for electability, these poll results reflect the very vague associations people have with well-known politicians, especially media darlings such as McCain, so it is hard to credit McCain’s apparent competitiveness to his own virtues as a candidate.  

P.S. The new CBS/NYT poll confirms that large numbers of Republicans (approximately one third) don’t know anything about Romney.  Romney has another problem: more of those who do know something about him view him unfavourably than favourably.  No big surprise there.

That same poll reveals how perilous and ultimately absurd claims about electability are.  Since electability really comes down to a question of perception, evidence of your electability disappears as soon as something better seems to come along.  Thus Giuliani was seen as the best candidate to win the general election by 43% last month (now at 12%, behind Huckabee), and this month 41% think this of McCain (while 7% thought so a month ago).  Should McCain lose in Michigan and South Carolina, these numbers will swing dramatically yet again.

Huckabee calls for a changing of the guard:

Many of us who have been Republicans out of conviction . . . the social conservatives were welcomed in the party as long as we sort of kept our place, but Lord help us if we ever stood forward and said we would actually like to lead the party.

While this is right as far as it goes, Huckabee really must want to go down in a blaze of glory if he insists on saying it out loud in front of everyone.

It’s too late to make a prediction for the Seahawks-Packers game, which has understandably turned into a rout of Seattle, but I will go out on a limb and say that the Jaguars are going to surprise some people (though probably not those who have been following Jacksonville closely) and defeat the Patriots with their running game 35-24.  Tomorrow, the Colts and Cowboys win by at least a touchdown.

Update: Jaguars lead 7-0 after first drive. Never mind.  My prediction also cursed the Colts and the Cowboys in their games.

Via Hotline:

MI State Rep. Fulton Sheen (R) announced at a rally today that he’s officially withdrawing his endorsement of Mitt Romney in order to back Mike Huckabee. Sheen, who said he’d served as a MI state chair for Romney (trying to confirm), pointed to the FairTax and his support of the MI FairTax ballot proposal, which Huckabee backs, as the main motivator for his decision.

Detroit Free Pressconfirms the switch, adding another reason for Sheen’s change of heart: because Huckabee stands for “for the Biblical, Judeo-Christian values on which this country was founded.”

Contrary to what you read here yesterday, Romney is apparently not in such bad shape in Michigan.  Rasmussen has him leading 26-25 over McCain with Huckabee in third at 17%.  The breakdown of evangelical and Catholic votes is exactly what you would expect.  Huckabee gets a healthy 32% of evangelicals, but just 4% of Catholics, which is low even for him.  Among Catholics, he is in sixth place behind Fred Thompson and Ron Paul.  Romney leads among every non-evangelical religious group.  The good news for Huckabee is that he was never expected to be able to win a state like Michigan, at least not at this stage, so a respectable third behind Romney, the “native son,” and McCain would not be such a bad outcome.  The only one who must win is Romney, and he seems to be in a good position to do it.  However, Romney’s position is once again deceptively strong: 58% of his supporters say they might change their mind or are unsure about supporting him, which is higher than for any other candidate.  McCain and Huckabee have pretty well locked down over half of their current supporters, which still leaves many impossible to pin down for certain.  Things could shift pretty quickly in the next couple of days. 

Curiously, Romney wins among both conservatives and liberals, but loses big to McCain among “moderates.”  As you would also expect, Huckabee also does best among the <$20K earners.  He also does well among the $65-75K earners, but he is actually leading among the lowest income group.  In every other income group, he trails Romney and McCain, each of whom gets about a quarter to a third of each income group except for the lowest one.  To give you a sense of how strange a mix Ron Paul supporters are, his best support (12%) comes from $20-40K earners and the $100K earners.  McCain's support generally increases as you go into the higher income groups, while Romney's fluctuates back and forth. Some marginally good news for Paul supporters: Paul shows some added strength in Michigan, now at 8%, ahead of Giuliani and almost tied with Thompson.  It is a dubious distinction to be ahead of someone who has abandoned the state and almost tied with the guy who isn't trying very hard up north, but it is better than previous polls I have seen.  The problem is that most of his support comes from non-GOP voters (he is second only to McCain in non-GOP support), which obviously doesn't help in later closed primaries.

Those days are over. In about eight weeks Giuliani has gone from frontrunner to second-tier candidate. ~Matthew Continetti

—————-

Giuliani says he isn’t worried. Conceding New Hampshire, he said, “Maybe we’ve lulled our opponents into a false sense of confidence now.”

Yeah, and maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot.

No, I don’t mean the amusingly cynical movie of the same name.  Coming back to that Florida poll, I should note the obvious: the vast majority of Floridians live in the center and south of the state, and these are the regions where McCain and Giuliani do best, where Romney is only moderately strong and where Huckabee is weakest.  Huckabee has to hope for high turnout in the less-populated northwest where he has overwhelming support, and obviously needs weak turnout in the big urban centers and the I-95 corridor where all three of his rivals have more support than he does.  The three or four-way split field is allowing Huckabee to live off the land and free media, relying on this regional backing from core supporters, but if he cannot start gaining ground among urban voters he may prove to be as limited a candidate as his critics originally claimed.  This would be somewhat surprising to me in some ways, but in another sense it isn’t at all surprising: Huckabee is doing best in that part of Florida that is still culturally most like the rest of the South, and he is weakest in the most multiethnic and polyglot part of the state.  Of course, a strong showing in Michigan and/or South Carolina could jumble the race in Florida yet again, so we’ll have to see.

Noted by several others, the results in Iowa show that Huckabee does not do very well with Catholic voters.  Crosstabs from this old Rasmussen Florida poll from last month suggest that there may be something to this.  In a poll where Huckabee registered 27% support, 17% of Catholics backed him, while receiving a whopping 46% from evangelicals.  Meanwhile, Giuliani received the second-largest share of Catholic support (26%), while Romney was backed by the same percentage of Catholics and non-evangelical Protestants (29%).  This has been the pattern in other states as well.

Rod, who endorsed Huckabee yesterday, said something in an earlier post that came to mind as I was thinking about this question:

For me, the Huck-as-change-agent theme comes down to this: an America led by a President Huckabee, and a conservative movement whose leader he is, might be an America and a conservatism where more people will read Wendell Berry — and for that matter, Catholic social thought.

If this pattern of limited Catholic support for Huckabee keeps up, barring the unlikely elevation of Michael Gerson in a future Huckabee Administration (there’s a scary thought), there may not be many who are supporting Huckabee who will be promoting Catholic social thought in any form.  More to the point, if this pattern continues, Huckabee probably cannot win a general election.

On one level, it makes perfect sense that Catholic voters would not respond well to Huckabee.  As a conservative Southern Baptist, he might appear to be no different from the Baptists who insist that Catholics are not Christians.  Catholic voters might conclude that the people who are voting against Romney and for Huckabee on account of religion may very well also view their church as a “cult,”  so they are withholding their support from Huckabee for that reason?  To the extent that the media have explained his political success, for the most part correctly, in terms of evangelical support, and to the extent that the media have, less accurately, talked up the anti-Mormon factor in discussing his campaign, it would not be hard for voters who know relatively little  about Huckabee to assume that he is simply the evangelical candidate with all of the possible anti-Catholic baggage that might entail.  On the other hand, why Catholic voters should respond so much more strongly to Romney is a puzzle.  He cannot claim any nominal or cultural connection to Catholicism, as Giuliani can, and his pro-life views are such a recent development that I find it hard to believe that he is winning over Catholic voters on this alone.  Is there some boomerang pro-Romney sympathy vote that has emerged in reaction against anti-Mormonism?  Perhaps Catholic voters are drawn to support the candidate who appears to be facing a “religious issue,” who currently hails from Massachusetts and who has invoked JFK’s speech on religion ad nauseam?

P.S.  The latest SurveyUSA Florida poll, while not giving any figures according to religious affiliation, confirms the pattern from the earlier poll.  Just look at the geographic distribution of Huckabee’s support: 40% in the northwest (the heavily evangelical Panhandle, including Pensacola) and 8% in the southeast (Miami-Dade and its surroundings).  Huckabee receives decent, but hardly overwhelming, support in the other regions of Florida (17-18%). Conversely, Giuliani fares best in the southeast (25%) and does horribly in the northwest (2%).  Romney runs strongest in northeast Florida (23%), receives 15% in SE Florida and receives only 8% in the northwest. Since Florida has something like 2.25 million Catholics living there, this could be a major hurdle for Huckabee (assuming that he does well enough in the rest of January that Florida still matters to his chances).  Huckabee’s other, unrelated Florida problem?  The elderly.  Voters 65+ are the core of McCain’s strength down there, while Huckabee leads among the youngest cohort and runs competitively in every other group.  Among the 65+ he is getting slaughtered by McCain 38-11, and he runs fourth overall among the eldest voters.  Somebody doesn’t like all that talk about the greatest generation being the one yet to be born.