At 8:13 p.m., Katherine Lopez posted this comment from a reader who was at one of the caucus sites:
"Looks like lots of young evangelicals."
Rich Lowry posted these results from an entrance poll at 9:39:
Huckabee...did well among (relatively) young voters, scoring higher among voters 17-29 and 30-44 than among older voters. Also, 37% of GOP voters said it mattered a great deal that a candidate shared their religious beliefs. Huck got 55% of them.
Mark Steyn followed shortly thereafter with this observation:
I'd...disagree with Ramesh's idea that this was a good night for Christians reaching across the aisle. It would be truer to say that for a proportion of Huck's followers there is no aisle: he's their kind of Christian, and all the rest - foreign policy, health care, mass transit, whatever - is details. This is identity politics of a type you don't often see on the Republican side.
Rich again, shortly after 10:00, regarding the youth vote:
Andy Kohut says it was 17% in 2004, and that up to 22% is a notable bump.
Rich again, after the results were nearly final:
60% of voters were evangelicals. Huck beat Romney among them 45-19%. 40% weren't evangelicals. Romney beat Huck among them 33-13%.
David Freddoso weighed in shortly after midnight with this regarding caucus-goers under 30 :
40 percent chose Mike Huckabee.
22 percent chose Mitt Romney.
21 percent chose Ron Paul.
Notice a trend? While it is certain that evangelicals put Huckabee over the top in Iowa, it was among young evangelicals where he ran the strongest. And among those young evangelicals, issues mattered little. The fact that Huckabee shared their faith was enough. Just as a female Democrat might feel perfectly justified voting for Hillary because she's a woman, just as a black Democrat might likewise vote for Obama because he's black, we now see the same phenomenon within the Republican party among evangelicals. Identity politics has arrived for the GOP.
I mentioned the young evangelical angle in one of my previous posts, stating that:
It is among...young people that Huckabee will be finding most of his support among evangelicals.
When I wrote that statement I was referencing an article in the current issue of National Review, which described the transformation within the evangelical community among those under 30. Though I didn't mention it then, I was also referencing personal experience. I know lots of young evangelicals: on my wife's side of the family all the nieces and nephews - and there are a bunch - can fairly be described as evangelical Christians. Many of them are now coming of age and will be able to vote in the next election. A few of them have married fellow evangelicals. Finer young people you will never meet. And, as far as I can tell, they are each and every one Huckabee supporters. None of them are what one would consider politically aware - like most young people, they follow politics only at a superficial level, if at all. On Christmas day I discussed with one of my nieces her support for Huckabee and she admitted as much. She told me since she was not really aware of the issues, she had to make her choice based on who she trusted the most. She trusted Huckabee because he was a man of God. He wouldn't disgrace the office. I couldn't argue with that, though I urged her to find out more about the issues, including the vital issue of Huckabee's electability. She seemed eager to hear my views on why Huckabee would make a poor candidate in a general election and a bad president. But by then it was time to open gifts and tend to more important family matters. Now she is back in Florida with her husband, an Air Force helicopter pilot who's already served a tour of duty in Iraq and is slated for another soon. He also supports Huckabee.
Since my first 'End of Reaganism' post on December 22, talk in the blogosphere on the subject has exploded (I can't really take any credit for this, since no one reads my blog.) There was a lot of talk about it before the New Year but David Brooks' column in the NYT on January 1 seems to have been a fresh catalyst. NRO actually had a symposium in which many of their writers weighed in. It's been discussed in The Corner, and many other places. For the most part, the consensus seems to be that Reaganism is alive and well, just waiting for a leader to rally us back to where we once were. Perhaps. But I think this consensus missed a vital point. Due to a significant demographic shift, we are losing one of the wings of Reaganism, the social conservatives made up in large part by the evangelical community. Huckabee, it seems to me, could just as well have run as a Democrat and these young evangelicals would still have supported him. His liberal policies, his astonishing naivete on foreign policy in a time of war, his economic populism, his nanny-statism, none of that seems to matter to this bloc of voters. Actually if it matters at all to them, it is a net positive, for these youth are kind-hearted, indeed tender-hearted, people. They want human suffering alleviated to whatever extent possible and through whichever agent is available. They've yet to discover that government bureaucracies are incompetent at delivering the outcomes they so sincerely hope for.
Mike Huckabee will either lose in the primaries or later in the general election - of that I have little doubt. But he's signalled to other evangelical populists that there is a base among the young for similar candidates to build on in the future. Unfortunately for the Reagan coalition, this base has little idea who Ronald Reagan was, and they care even less. Mike Huckabee shares their faith - what else matters?
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