Well, Huckabee got the targeted 3rd place in New Hampshire, although he fell short of the 16% mark that i set as a goal. That's still good, particularly when you consider his polling position at the beginning of December, when Huckabee was, at best, in 5th place.
Less encouraging is a review of the exit poll data. Huckabee did not make much, if any, headway expanding his voting bloc beyond church-going social conservatives. The only segments he led in were (a) folks who attend church more than once a week (a NH segment representing only 9% of GOP primary voters), and (b) those self-identified as born-agains or evangelicals. And in that 2nd group, which were only 23% of the NH GOP voters, Huckabee only pulled 28%, tied with McCain, and only a shade ahead of Romney (27%).
This has to change. I don't profess to be so smart to advise the campaign how to do it. I'll leave that to the pros. And maybe it's just that New Hampshire was better suited to the top 2 finishers. After all, in Iowa, Huckabee had the top showing amongst almost all demographics, though without crosstabs, i cannot analyze if the Huckappeal extended beyond born-agains in any of the subsegments, or if that's just a case of the born-agains dominating the electoral landscape there.
One thing worth noting is that Iowa is more representative (than is New Hampshire) of what the rest of the GOP primaries will look like. In Iowa, 60% of the GOP voters were self-identified as either evangelicals or born-agains. In New Hampshire, that same figure was only 23%, as i noted above. But, as i pointed out a few days ago, Barna Research finds that fully 45% of Americans self-identify as born-again. And given that that group skews toward the GOP, it is fair to conclude that over half of GOP voters are born-again. Therefore, Iowa's 60% is more "normal" than is New Hampshire's 23%.
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