Trailhead: A campaign blog.

Huckabee Dropped Out, Right?

Results from the last several Republican primaries force one to occasionally stop for a fact-check: Mike Huckebee did drop out of the race, right? Like, almost three months ago?

Or more to the point: Is anyone in the McCain camp worried that an opponent who called it off on March 4 is still winning 10 percent of the vote? Or that their guy is only winning about three-quarters of the vote, largely against defunct candidates?

With 100 percent of precincts reporting in Kentucky, McCain won 72.3 percent of the vote. Huckabee raked in 8.2 percent, and Ron Paul, who’s actually still in the race, won 6.8 percent. All told, non-McCain candidates won nearly 28 percent of the vote in the Republican contest. By contrast, Barack Obama won 30 percent in the Democratic contest. 

Two weeks ago, Huckabee won 10 percent in Indiana and 12.1 percent in North Carolina.

To be fair, the presumptive nominee doesn’t always receive overwhelming margins of the vote after the contest is functionally over. In May of 2004, John Edwards won 13.4 percent in West Virginia and 11.2 percent in Indiana, well after John Kerry had it wrapped up. Perhaps this is the voters’ way of notching their choice for a running mate?

And look how well that turned out for those two.

BREAKING: McCain Wins Pennsylvania

With nearly half of precincts reporting, Trailhead is prepared to cautiously call the Republican primary for John McCain, who currently leads the state with 72 percent of the vote against one man who dropped out 49 days ago and another who rarely tops 6 percent in national polls.   

Former candidate Mike Huckabee, who still appeared on the ballot even though he dropped out after McCain clinched a majority of delegates after the March 4 primaries, is pulling down 12 percent of the vote, while libertarian-minded candidate Ron Paul is drawing about 16 percent. For a few sweet moments, it appeared that Armstrong County would come through for Paul, whose small but ardent base has made him a significant presence on the Internet, if not in the polls. But that light-pink blip on CNN’s county-by-county map quickly evaporated as more results registered.

Candidates like McCain with no mathematical chance of losing the election are naturally less likely to draw hordes of supporters to the ballot booth, while Paul’s supporters are a determined bunch who seem indefatigable. The one in eight people who still showed up to vote for Huckabee are more puzzling and perhaps do not bode well for McCain’s odds in Pennsylvania in the general election. Then again, Pennsylvania, while not overwhelmingly blue, hasn’t elected a Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Huck, Fin

No one is ever happy to concede an election, but as political narratives go, Mike Huckabee has nothing to be ashamed of. After bobbing along for months in the basement of national polls with almost no national name recognition, this former Arkansas governor’s quixotic bid briefly launched him into the national spotlight, reorganizing the race for the Republican nomination overnight. Sure, he never really had a shot in a race that, unlike the Democratic side, is structured to weed out the competition early with winner-take-all primaries that starve people like Mike Huckabee of delegates. The fact that the odds were so stacked against him worked well for his public image; it made it much easier to ignore his wack-job approach to subjects like evolution in favor of his adorable jokes and extended metaphors. For that, we offer this eulogy: 

Mike Huckabee, progenitor of quaint witticisms and mixed metaphors, bowed out of the campaign tonight with the aura of an aged prizefighter ceding to the reality of his waning strength. Appearing next to his wife, Janet, who stood by her husband with the statuesque dignity of a portrait, he spoke in the soft tones of a grade school principal bidding farewell to a graduating class. The country must be “the best nation we can be,” he said, but it was “time to hit the reset button.” Though he posted a promising batting average in the early days of this primary season, in the end Mike Huckabee simply couldn’t bring his runners home. His Boy Scout morals and Yogi Berra charm were insufficient to bring him home in the Pinewood Derby of American politics, but we will forever remember him, like we remember the famed Alamo upon which another great American battle was fought and lost, for making red and blue American seem ever so slightly more united in the color of his prose.

Exit Polls Greatest Hits: Republicans

Sure, exit polls are notoriously unreliable and they don’t matter, but they’re all the data we have for a while. So, let’s delve into the juicy stats from the surprisingly close GOP race in Virginia:

• At least one poll leading up to today's event showed McCain making strides among Evangelicals, but it looks like those numbers were very exaggerated. Half of the state’s voters were born-again Christians or evangelicals, and they favored Huckabee over McCain by 40 points.
• Sixty-one percent of voters said McCain was most qualified to be commander in chief, but 30 percent of that bloc still voted for Mike Huckabee anyway.
• Sixty-six percent of voters consider themselves conservatives (rather than moderates). Conservatives favored Huckabee over McCain by 23 points.
• Ninety-three percent of the Republican electorate was white. Sixty-one percent of Democratic voters were white.
• Sixty percent of Republicans said they listen to conservative talk radio. Huckabee led among those voters by 12 points.
• Pro-life Republicans are still favoring Huckabee over McCain (56 percent to 35 percent), while pro-choicers continue to ally themselves with McCain (64 percent to 24 percent).

We offer our usual disclaimer that these numbers can change. All stats taken from CNN’s stats.