The Crossed Pond

This is less to knock Huckabee and more to cool expectations (which HELPS Huckabee!).

In Iowa, no doubt Huckabee is locked in for a top two finish. It would be astounding, at this point, if he failed that. However, as The Right’s Field reminds us, polling is good at checking momentum, but often bad at predicting margins or other unaccounted factors such as organization or institutional support. If this is absolutely true of anywhere, it’s true of Iowa, where something like 10% of eligible party votes coming out represents a huge turnout (as happened in 2004, and said turnout doesn’t always help the “populist” momentum guy, as also happened in 2004). And it’s not just turnout, in Iowa, it’s the ability to twist the right arms at the right times by having such unsexy things as the right Precinct Captains and the right support-herders (that’s what they’re called) and other such advantages that tend to come only if you’ve invested a lot of organization time. The New York Times points this out:

Mr. Huckabee has been ramping up his organization in Iowa, but it still remains far behind Mr. Romney’s. The campaign recently doubled the office space at its headquarters in downtown Des Moines; it now has 17 paid employees in Iowa, up from 3 over the summer. The campaign is broadcasting commercials in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and is preparing its first mailing in Iowa.

But the campaign remains bare bones in many ways. It has not had the money to do any polling. The campaign predicts that it will have precinct captains in the major caucus precincts, but not in all of them. Mr. Huckabee’s Iowa state director, Eric Woolson, got a BlackBerry only about a month ago.

But The Politico has gotten at this even better:

The caucuses are still “an organizational exercise when you get right down to it,” Woolson adds, dropping the bar another notch. “And Romney has been here for a long time with a lot of people and a lot of money.”

Spin aside, every Iowa Republican contacted for this story cites Huckabee’s utter lack of a campaign structure as his most formidable obstacle to win.

“There’s no such thing as any Huckabee ground game that I see at all,” observes Failor.

Televangelist Pat Robertson maximized the Christian community in Iowa to finish a surprise second in 1988, Failor notes, but he did so with a 99-county organization that had been built over many months.

“The church community is excitable, energizable and movable, but if you don’t have apparatus to move those people on caucus night it doesn’t matter,” Failor says. “It’s all about organization – always has been and always will be.’

Now I, like everybody who is anybody, am quite enjoying the slack-jawed sputtering coming from the royalists in the GOP over the Huckabee surge. And I have to say this, the sheer hilarity of that reaction masks what is actually a pretty unsettling proposition, which is causing me to slowly come around (again) towards being positive about Huckabee (I’ll post more on that later, but the short version of the proposition is “Christianity is only okay when it’s surface, wielded with the intent to cleave, and subservient to conservatism”).

But it is important to remember that right now, Huckabee’s support is all on paper. He’s launched himself into contention, no doubt, but to mistake the surging poll numbers with the presumption that that’s all going to translate into hard support is a mistake one should not make. Particularly in the early states, there are other factors in play, factors that the Huckabee campaign is almost uniquely unsuited to handle as yet. And going into Iowa with a massive bubble of support, momentum, and expectations, but with a very tiny amount of organization, institutional backing, or ability to capitalize is a recipe perhaps for a big surprise, but also perhaps for a massive de-inflation. Watch the poll numbers carefully in the last week before the caucus. Polls in Iowa tend to only be good at predicting placing, not margins. Even if he keeps clocking in at #1, it could turn out in a dead heat, and it’s hard to say what that does to the media boost coming out (for either Huckabee or Romney). If, as happened to Howard Dean, Huckabee starts downticking at the last minute even right under the nose of glowing media parades and war cries from enthusiastic supporters, that could be a sign that Huckabee peaked too early, with too little ability to turn the Big Mo into Big Votes. I have to admit, for the first time since June, I’m thinking of selling my stock in Huckabee winning Iowa and the nomination (if I could figure out how).

As I said in some other post around here, if anybody has a shot at being the next Bill Clinton, it’s Mike Huckabee. But if anybody has a shot at being the next Howard Dean, it’s Mike Huckabee as well.