Conservative blogosphere off-target on Huckabee
by WonkoKevin
I didn’t know what to be more surprised about this morning: (a) I was able to go to bed almost fully informed of the outcomes by 10:30PM, (b) Mike Huckabee has been annointed the challenger now in a two-person race, or (c) the Phoenix Suns are considering trading Shawn Marion for Shaq. On the Democratic side, Chuck Todd at MSNBC predicted a 4-delegate win for Obama–out of over 1600 delegates! You couldn’t get much more of a tie than that. Of course, people hate ties, so there’s spin that Obama didn’t get the knock-out punch expected competing with spin the Clinton lost her last chance to put Obama away. Moving forward, Reid Wilson at RCP sees advantage-Obama, as Obama appears poised to win most of the states between now and March 4, and figures the momentum will carry him to wins in Texas and Ohio. Thomas Edsall at RCP cites others though that see Obama’s difficulty with Hispanic voters being a big barrier to winning in those two states. People are already looking to Indiana, North Carolina, and Kentucky in May. Remember, every Dem in the House is a super-delegate, so this race literally may be decided by the House of Representatives.
On the Republican side, a nice but not slam-dunk victory for McCain. Romney may well drop out of the race today, and it’s hard to do the math that brings Huckabee to victory. The question remains how long Romney and Huckabee will stay in, and perhaps the affiliated question, why. The largest Wonkosphere-related lesson to learn from Tsunami Tuesday is that sometimes the blogosphere can get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong. Conservative bloggers picked up on Huckabee earlier than anyone else and fell in love with his personality; as he picked up popularity in the polls, conservative bloggers turned negative on his policies. Even with a win in Iowa, Huckabee’s buzz share began to decline in early January. Over the past month his buzz share has plummeted down to the 5% range, almost trivial. And yet, the MSM spin on last night is that Huck’s southern victories catapult him ahead of Romney. Conservative bloggers missed it–why? Three possible answers, all are probably a bit true. First, the “opinion leading” conservative blogs aren’t connected to and aren’t paying attention to the religious right AND the South, which is being taken for granted. Second, the South for whatever reason is under-represented in the blogosphere. We know in general that Internet usage across the world is inversely proportional to the outside temperature… are there fewer bloggers in the more temperate South? Third, Huckabee’s viral support is face-face ”word of mouth” and not blog-blog word of mouth. Early buzz share data today indicates that conservative bloggers still aren’t paying much attention to Huck.
