US Politics / Chicken Dinner / 13 December 2007 /

Chickendinner say the 'faith, family and freedom' man can land the Iowa caucus...

When Mike Huckabee entered the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa, he was fifth in a field of five. By the first week in December, the rock guitar-playing evangelical former Arkansas governor had overtaken the long time leader in the polls Mitt Romney and was first in a field of six.

Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, had spent a lot of time and a lot of money building support in Iowa, some estimates put his spend at around $7 million. Huckabee had done neither (operating on a humiliatingly small budget, he is believed to have spent $400,000 building his "Faith, family, freedom" campaign there.) Not surprisingly, given this surge with just three weeks to go to voting on January 3, Huckabee's price to win in the Hawkeye state has shrunk to [1.3], Mitt Romney is drifting at [2.4].

The Iowa caucus is the state's big opportunity to show, once every four years, that it is about more than just pigs and corn. As the first state in the nation to declare its preference for the presidential nominees, it is capable of putting wind in the sails of a strong campaign, or capable of crippling a weak one at the first hurdle. Coming into the final straight of the Iowa vote hustle, Mike Huckabee is looking like this year's main beneficiary of the phenomenon.

For the Republicans, the first sign of what might happen in the caucus comes in August of the preceding year with the Iowa Straw Poll, held in those years when there is no incumbent Republican president running for re-election. Out of the five Iowa Straw Polls that have taken place, only once, in 1987, has the winner of the Iowa Straw Poll not gone onto win the Iowa caucus. Mitt Romney was the winner in August 2007 with 31.6 per cent of the vote - a 13.5 per cent majority over closest rival Mike Huckabee. Three of every four of the Republican candidates that have won the Iowa caucus have then gone on to eventually win their party's nomination.

Just three out of the eight winners of the Iowa caucus for the Republican party have then gone on to win the presidency - George W Bush twice (and one of them was unopposed in 2004), and Ronald Reagan, who also won the Iowa caucus unopposed in 1984, which suggests that if Huckabee does win, his campaign may be transformed in vitality overnight, but not enough to win the White House.

The average winning percentage of votes for a Republican candidate in the Iowa caucus has been 34 per cent. The lowest winning percentage of votes was by Bob Dole who won with 26 per cent of the vote in 1996. The highest percentage of votes a Republican has got in the Iowa caucus was George W Bush in 2000 when he received 41 per cent of the vote. Huckabee is currently projected to receive around 32 per cent of the vote, Romney around 22 per cent.

Huckabee has also been helped by a virtual silence from his Democrat rivals, who have been churning out press releases to discredit the national favourite for the Republican nomination, Rudy Giuliani [44.0].

The Democrats would love Huckabee to win, as his ultra-conservative views on a number of issues such as abortion and AIDS would make him an 'easy kill'. The Democrat National Committee calls Huckabee the "glass jaw", a jaw they fancy they could quite easily break. Indeed the only real chance anyone has of slamming the brakes on his success in Iowa is for one of the Republican candidates to start throwing some mud regarding his overdependence on biblical solutions for modern problems and lack of experience, especially military experience.

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