Young evangelicals embrace Huckabee

In South Carolina, a make-or-break state for Mr. Huckabee and one where evangelicals are expected to make up more than a third of the Republican primary voters, the Huckabee campaign had only a state manager and two paid staff members until about two weeks ago.

But more than 500 people, many of them young evangelicals, have signed up for online Huckabee meet-up groups, said Christian Hine, 30, the state coordinator of the Huck’s Army effort. Unaided by the campaign, volunteers have borrowed church directories and bought their own phone lists to try to identify likely Huckabee voters, Mr. Hine said, and even paid to print their own Huckabee signs when the campaign ran out.

In November, volunteers associated with Huck’s Army raised about $1,550 to hire a plane towing a “Huckabee for President — HucksArmy.com” banner to circle over the South Carolina-Clemson football game, one of the biggest sporting events in the state. (Among other endeavors, members of the group also pitched in about $500 to buy pizza, balloons and doughnuts for Huckabee volunteers before the Iowa caucus.)

“Huckabee is a change for the conservative Christian movement, and a welcome one,” said Jennifer Stec, a 34-year-old homemaker in Lexington, S.C., who built a network of about 400 Huckabee volunteers. She started with her church Sunday school class, she said, and later printed her own Huckabee business cards and passed them out at the supermarket.

Risks in having secular allies
Alice Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. Huckabee, said the campaign “would love to have the support of the generals” of the Christian conservative movement, “but we are more than happy to have the support of the troops, and that seems to be what is happening here.” Ms. Stewart said the Harris brothers were especially “instrumental,” pointing out that they helped enlist the actor Chuck Norris, who now accompanies Mr. Huckabee on the trail.

Since Mr. Huckabee’s success in Iowa, however, his campaign has faced a barrage of attacks on his conservative credentials. Rush Limbaugh has accused him of “class warfare.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page has called him “religious left.” And his Republican rivals have escalated their criticism. In a debate on Thursday, Mr. Thompson called Mr. Huckabee a “Christian leader” who would support “liberal economic policies” and “liberal foreign policies.”

Mr. Huckabee insists that he is conservative on those issues, saying that he has pledged not to raise taxes and that he lowered many in Arkansas. His advisers say his populism will attract enough disaffected middle-class Republicans to make up for any hawkish or antitax votes he loses.

But some Christian conservatives say that no matter the energy at their grass roots, the animosity of their secular allies may well doom his campaign.

Richard Land, the top public policy official of the Southern Baptist Convention, argued that just as small-government and foreign-policy conservatives could not win a primary without evangelicals, “I don’t think evangelicals can win without most of the rest of those coalitions.

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