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Mike Huckabee is the Republican Iowans Have Been Waiting For
8/18/07
Summary: Mike Huckabee has a bump in post-debate polls then drops back down after voters question his viability. With Huckabee's strong second place performance at the Ames Straw Poll, his viability will no longer be questioned by Iowa voters. Look for a surge in the upcoming polls.
Empirical Observations Suggest Voters Want Huckabee But Unsure if He Can Win
There is no doubt in our minds that Mike Huckabee is fighting against the "He can't win" label. Just look at his poll numbers, they go up whenver he is in the national spotlight (i.e. after a debate) but then they come right back down.
The reasons poll numbers drop for a lower tiered candidate like Huckabee is because people see that he is behind Romney, Giuliani, McCain, F. Thompson. His lower tiered status and aura of "can't win" precludes them from voting for him even though they may want to. This phenomenon leads to an up and down roller coaster ride to his poll numbers where voters want to vote him in but then change their minds after seeing disappointing poll numbers.
We understand the polling methods can differ from poll to poll and in and of itself cause volatility in the numbers but we feel the volatility is also more closely attributable to this phenomenon because Joe Biden is suffering from the same syndrome on the Democratic side.
Take a look at the following table that we have put together that show clear gains by Mike Huckabee in the poll immediately following each of the debates.
| Debate | Polls Before Debate | Poll After Debate | Net Gain |
| May 3, 2007 (Simi Valley, CA) | ARG, 2% | Des Moines Register, 4% | 2% |
| May 15, 2007 (Columbia, SC) | Research 2000, 2% Zogby International, 1% |
Strategic Vision, 3% | 1.5% |
| June 5, 2007 (Manchester, NH) | ARG, 2% | Mason Dixon, 7% | 5% |
| August 5, 2007 (Des Moines, IA) | ARG, 1% University of Iowa, 3% ABC News, 8% |
Ames Straw Poll*, 18.0% | 14% |
* Ames Straw Poll is not a scientific poll but added for effect.
If you look at Mike Huckabee's raw averages each month, you will not see a considerable increase (published on our Huckabee stat sheet) so that is why it becomes so crucial sometimes to focus in on the maximums.
| State | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | June | July | Aug |
| Iowa | 1.7 | 2.0 | 2.0 | 2.0 | 2.3 | 5.0 | 3.7 | 3.0 |
Ames Straw Poll Performance will Remove Doubt from Doubters
Mike Huckabee's strong second place performance at the Ames Straw Poll will help remove all doubts as to whether or not he can win. The up-and-down roller coast ride to his poll numbers are going to stop and we are going to notice gradual increases for Huckabee in Iowa.
Mike Huckabee acknowledges this on Fox News August 13, 2007 with Greta.
"...all those people who said well we are not sure that you are viable so we are not going to contribute ... unless we see some traction... we started calling them and saying we've got the traction, where's the check?... We got a 1,000 new donors from Saturday night to Tuesday, we raised more money online in about 2 days ... than we had raised almost in the previous 4 weeks... There is an alternative... they have a candidate that has actually has the chance to win." - Mike Huckabee, 8/13/07 on Fox News
Large Undecided Voting Block Favors Mike Huckabee
For those voters that like the Huckabee, Brownback, and Tancredo alternatives, they will vote for the candidate of that group they feel is most likely to win. Thanks to Ames, Huckabee is that candidate and we expect the supporters of the other lower tiered candidates to converge towards supporting Huckabee.
There is upwards of about 20% undecided Republican voters in the upcoming Iowa Caucus. Undecided voters will traditionally flock to the lesser known challengers in any election because they are already familiar with the well known candidates (like Giuliani, McCain, and Romney) and to still be undecided despite the familiarity is generally a reflection of the fact that those voters have rejected the top tier.
This suggests that a good proportion of the undecided Republican voters will support a candidate other than Giuliani, Romney, McCain, and F. Thompson (Rudy McRomneyson). We are approximating that 80% of those Undecided will choose a candidate out of the top tier, 20% will choose Rudy McRomneyson. If we divvy up those undecideds in exactly the same proportion they voted in at the Ames Straw Poll (excluding Romney), Huckabee would see a nice 3-5% overall bump in the polls. Voters supporting Brownback, Tancredo, and Paul would get a combined 12% under that same assumption but voters would likely reconsider their preferences and jump to Huckabee's side because he would be seen as the only alternative to the top tier that can win. With this 3-5%, Huckabee is poised for a combined 8% jump in the Iowa polls to mid-teens.
To assume 40% of undecideds will support Huckabee may seem like a stretch but consider the 1979 Ohio Governor race. The incumbent James Rhodes was leading challenger Charles Kurfess 66% to 6% in the polls with 28% undecided. The final election results were 67% to 33%. Even if we assume the poll was really 61% to 11% to take into account the margin of error, we would have found that 80% of the undecided voters chose the challenger. This leads us to why we made the approximation that 80% of Undecideds would reject Rudy McRomneyson and half of those select Mike Huckabee for President.
Mike Huckabee #1 Underdog Candidate
A second element of Undecided voters is that they may have multiple preferences and are stuck between choosing a couple of them. So if there are voters stuck between Mike Huckabee and another candidate, they might have felt like they were throwing away their vote if they supported a "can't win" candidate. So they support a top tier candidate at the polls but secretly have that lower tiered candidate as their #2 preference.
This is how rankings of choices can help analysts determine the up and coming lower tiered candidates.
But Huckabee is no longer a can't win lower tiered candidate... so much of the voters that supported him as a #2 candidate will begin to support him at the top of the ticket.
Choiceranker.com allows visitors to rank candidates by preference... As of the date of this article, Mike Huckabee has the largest number of second place votes... just a little nudge is necessary to boost him to #1 choice for many of these. In fact, proving our theory that voters like lower tiered candidates as their #2 choice, we see the top 6 candidates in 2nd place votes combined to get 54.11% but combined to get just 11% in the latest Gallup national poll.
| Candidate | Latest Gallup National Poll | 2nd Place Percentage at ChoiceRanker.com |
| Mike Huckabee | 4% | 22.95% |
| Tom Tancredo | 1% | 10.66% |
| Duncan Hunter | 2% | 6.56% |
| Sam Brownback | 1% | 5.74% |
| Tommy Thompson | n/a | 5.74% |
| Ron Paul | 3% | 2.46% |
| Mitt Romney | 14% | 2.46% |
| John McCain | 11% | 2.46% |
| Rudy Giuliani | 32% | 1.64% |
| Fred Thompson | 19% | 0.82% |
| Jim Gilmore | n/a | 0.82% |
Considering Huckabee beat out his closest underdog competitor Tancredo by a 2:1 margin, Huckabee is the Republicans #1 underdog candidate.
The Republican poll at ChoiceRanker.com is currently still open, and we advise you to go there and rank your choices.
It is true that Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, and Ron Paul also did well at the straw poll when you take into account the fact that Mitt Romney was expected to beat his next closest competitor by a factor of 8:1.
But if you look at the results in the bluntest of fashions, Mike Huckabee's second place performance means that he was the winner of all the underdogs, case closed.
Underdog candidates struggle in the polls among likely voters because of a lack of media coverage and poor name recognition. Voters do not even know all of your stances on the issues and even if they did, these candidates suffer from the "I would vote for him but he cant win." virus. Voters want to vote for someone they feel can win and provided the latest on the campaign trail, Mike Huckabee has does everything to convince Iowa that he is very viable and that he can win.
Mike Huckabee Can Challenge Mitt Romney in Iowa
A very traditional state like Iowa favors Huckabee over Romney. Romney has had contradictory positions on abortion and he is a mormon while Huckabee is on the side of life and is a former Baptist pastor. If the conclusions made above that Huckabee is poised for a jump in the polls, voters for the top tier candidates looking for a more traditional christian conservative may also switch to Huckabee creating a vacuum at the top for the rest of the primary season.
Contributors to this Article
David Terr, holds a PhD in Mathematics with a concentration in Number Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. He is widely published in number theory journals and currently studies how poll movement occurs and what they mean over the course of political campaigns.
Proloy Bhattacharyya holds an MS in Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles with a concentration in Probability and Statistics.
USAElectionPolls.com can be reached by phone at (310) 487-8657.
Relevant Information
- Mike Huckabee is the real winner at the Ames Straw Poll
- Huckabee has highest 2nd place vote total at ChoiceRanker, August 2007 (will continue open until end of August).
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