How Mike Huckabee Could Wreck the GOP Primaries

Most sane and rational people view Mike Huckabee as a religious extremist whack job.  Those people, however, do not comprise the GOP party base where the embrace of ignorance, bigotry and thumping the Bible are all strong positives.  Should Huckabee throw his hat in the ring for the GOP presidential nomination, even if he loses, he could help push the other candidates to embrace crazy land as they try to counter Huckabee's appeal to lunatic evangelical voters who folk to GOP primaries.  A piece in the New York Times looks at what Huckabee could do to GOP aspirations.  Here are excerpts:

The most important name that you haven’t heard much about in the Republican primary race is nonetheless a familiar one: Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who took the pageantry of presidential announcements to a nearly parodic level on Friday by appearing on national television to announce that he would announce whether he would run on May 5.

Mr. Huckabee may not be receiving much attention, but he is as important as any of the other second-tier candidates in the race, like Ted Cruz or Rand Paul. He has demonstrated appeal to a crucial bloc of Republican primary voters: the religious right. If he runs, he will be one of the most significant figures in the primary season, with the ability to deny a crucial segment of voters or even states to another candidate.

Mr. Huckabee is a Southern Baptist minister and a compelling politician with natural appeal to evangelical voters and cultural conservatives. In 2008, his support among evangelicals allowed him to carry Iowa and five primaries.

He’s averaging around 9 percent in national polls, putting him ahead of candidates like Mr. Cruz, Mr. Paul, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie. Unsurprisingly, Fox News, ABC/Washington Post and Quinnipiac surveys over the last month suggest that strength is being driven by evangelicals, who have offered Mr. Huckabee an average of 15 percent of their support. 

It is easy to overlook the significance of evangelicals in the Republican Party.  . . . .  But the religious right remains the single largest voting bloc in the Republican Party, and that role has not diminished at all over the last decade.Evangelical Christians make up 49 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners, according to a Pew Research polarization data set . . . . They represent as much as 80 percent of the primary vote in the Deep South and, more significantly, around 60 percent of Iowa caucus-goers.

A conservative candidate who hopes to win Iowa, like Mr. Cruz or Scott Walker, needs a substantial chunk of the evangelical vote. If Mr. Huckabee enters the race, he could pose a big roadblock to both. . . . And if Mr. Huckabee does win — as he very plausibly could over a strong, divided field — he will deny a more viable conservative candidate the easiest opportunity to consolidate the conservative opposition to Jeb Bush, or whoever wins New Hampshire.

Mr. Huckabee, to be clear, is not an especially viable national candidate. He won virtually no support among non-evangelical voters in 2008 . . . . It is unlikely that Mr. Huckabee could ever appeal to the relatively secular half of the Republican Party. He has adopted an increasingly strident tone on cultural issues and is strongly opposed by many fiscal conservatives, who have criticized him for raising taxes, increasing spending and opposing school vouchers as governor of Arkansas.

Mr. Huckabee is a classic factional candidate: someone whom the rest of the party would almost certainly rally to defeat if he seemed within striking distance of the nomination, but whose strength among a large faction of the party allows him to play a crucial, even possibly decisive, role in the race.