[1518] Of Ayatollah Huckabee lost

Mr. Mike “I-want-to-change-the-Constitution” Huckabee lost the South Carolina’s primaries. Just days before the South Coralina’s primaries, Huckabee said this (via):

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view. [Huckabee: Amend Constitution to be in ‘God’s standards’. The Raw Story. January 15 2008]

Though it is hard to say how his call for God’s standard affected his odd of winning the primaries, I am sure we will find out soon. But why his loss in South Carolina is so important?

Mr. Huckabee’s loss in a Southern state with a strong turnout of religious voters was a setback to his campaign as it heads toward potentially less hospitable states. [McCain Has Big Win in South Carolina; Huckabee Falls Short. NYT. January 20 2008]

As for Iowa where he won earlier (before the Ayatollah expressed his desire to undo secularism in the US), his appeals to the Christian right might actually put the Catholics off:

One of the commenters to my post below suggested that Mike Huckabee was unlikely to do well among Catholics. Philip Klinkner (who is really blogging interesting stuff on the races) has some county-level data from Iowa suggesting that this is true. [Huckabee, Romney and Catholics. Crooked Timber. January 7 2008]

The Crooked Timber has graphics to show how Huckabee fared in Catholic-dominated countries in Iowa.

And yes, Ron Paul has outdone Giuliani for four out of six times now: Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina all prefer Paul to Giuliani. In Nevada, Ron Paul is second!

I am not the only one whom are excited of Dr. Paul’s consistent performance against Giuliani:

In case you’re wondering how fringe candidate Ron Paul has fared against “front-runner” Rudy Giuliani, here are the approximate popular vote totals for both candidates so far this primary season (including 93% reporting from South Carolina):
Paul: 105,848 votes
Giuliani: 60,213 votes [Go Ron Paul. Daily Kos. January 19 2008]

As a result so far, Paul has approximately 6 delegates behind him. Giuliani has only abot 2. The front runner is Romney with possibly 68 delegates.^[1]

I used to have high hope for Giuliani but as time progressed and as I learned more about each Republican as well as Democrat candidate, it became clear that his position on the question liberty and security does not match mine. With other candidates possibly mirroring his more palatable positions, it was not hard to remove him from my list.

I know that Ron Paul has no chance of winning but I think, like all that support him, it is mostly about principles and issues rather than a bandwagon effect that plagues many observers and voters alike. David Brooks may have described many voters succinctly two days ago:

In reality, we voters — all of us — make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness. ”People often act without knowing why they do what they do,” Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, noted in an e-mail message to me this week. ”The fashion of political writing this year is to suggest that people choose their candidate by their stand on the issues, but this strikes me as highly implausible.” [How Voters Think. David Brooks. NYT. January 18 2008]

^[1] — See Results of the 2008 Republican presidential primaries at Wikipedia. ^[↩]