Of course Mike Huckabee can win the Republican nomination. I dismissed the possibility a few weeks ago by saying he had no “path to the nomination,” and I was foolish to do so. Huckabee’s path is evident — with surprising victories in early states, he steamrolls faltering campaigns and pushes them aside until he is the only guy left standing. This is precisely the Mitt Romney strategy, only instead of being manufactured at great expense with a campaign machine as Romney’s was, Huckabee’s path is being cleared for him not by money and media but but by an honest-to-God (or, perhaps, given Huckabee’s own sentiments about the role of Christ in his campaign, honest-to-Jesus) groundswell. So the Romney strategy is working, but it may not be working for Romney, in Iowa, at least.
Perhaps the most telling sign of Huckabee’s potential national success is his ability to drain the life out of the nominating strategies of other campaigns. First, he vampirized Fred Thompson — the candidate who was supposed to emerge relatively late as the socially conservative Southerner and overwhelm the other candidates with his capacity to unite core Republican constituencies. Thompson was half-hearted about it — wanted to talk more about the threat of Social Security, which no voter actually cares about — but Huckabee is not. Having subsumed Thompson, Huckabee is now in the process of trying to subsume Romney. And if Huckabee should actually win Florida on January 29 — the state that was supposed to confirm Rudy Giuliani’s sure march to the nomination — then Huckabee will have gone from swallowing Thompson whole to swallowing Romney whole to swallowing Giuliani whole.
In this scenario, that leaves McCain, the only candidate who doesn’t actually have a theory about how to win ever since his strategy to run as the party consensus frontrunner blew up so spectacularly over the summer. Right now it seems McCain is just winging it, trying to score better numbers than anyone expected in New Hampshire and seeing if that reignites mainstream Republican enthusiasm for him. If the race for the Republican presidential nomination has taken a turn away from theories, and if a guy with little or no money (Huckabee) can stage a dramatic race to the front of the pack, then a guy with little or no money (McCain) can begin to move on Huckabee in January.
This scenario depends on Rudy Giuliani’s slide becoming permanent, and on Mitt Romney deciding he doesn’t want to waste any more of his fortune on a losing battle. But if Giuliani arrests his slide, and Romney goes all in with up to $100 million of his own money, then the three of them — Giuliani, Romney, and McCain — will be battling to make the case that he and only he can save the Republican Party from a Goldwater-level electoral disaster in November with Huckabee at the top of the ticket.
