Grass-roots activists fill void within GOP
Huckabee gains amid disarray of party elites
 Mike Huckabee (left), with his band and an Elvis impersonator at the Ames, Iowa, straw poll in August, picked up votes from ‘‘fair tax’’ and home schooling supporters. (David Lienemann/ Associated Press/ File) |
DES MOINES - Eric Woolson, the director of Mike Huckabee's Iowa campaign, had no idea what a "fair tax" was until he tried to raise a crowd to see Huckabee's band, Capital Offense, perform following a Republican state-party dinner in April.
Struggling to fill the room, he soon realized that he was competing for attention with a group called Americans for Fair Taxation that happened to be giving away iPods and college-football tickets in a nearby hospitality suite. "I was thinking, I don't know who these guys are but I hope they get done quickly," said Woolson.
Around the same time, Woolson was surprised to learn that a growing number of volunteers were coming to the campaign's Des Moines headquarters and citing an unfamiliar aspect of Huckabee's record: that while governor of Arkansas, he had named an advocate of home-schooling to the state board of education.
A few months later, those two once-unknown interest groups - representing families that home-school their children, a practice popular among evangelical Christians, and advocates for a national sales tax, a proposal Huckabee first endorsed in May - were crucial in turning out votes for him at the closely watched Ames straw poll in August.
Huckabee addressed a breakfast of several hundred home-school supporters prior to the vote, and Woolson believes it was fair tax backers who helped boost the candidate's impressive second-place showing - Huckabee's first show of support among party activists and an early step towards his current place at the head of the GOP pack in Iowa.
Not long ago, the only conservative interest groups with real clout in the nominating process were such legendary powerhouses as the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, the National Rifle Association - which drew from large donor lists cultivated over decades and supplied eager volunteers in political contests across the country.
Today that interest-group coalition faces collapse. Social and economic conservatives, two key Republican blocs, have yet to unite behind a common candidate, depriving groups such as the Christian Coalition of a rallying point. That uncertainty has caused grass-roots activists to go follow their own path, often at odds with party elites.
"There is no clear front-runner in this race, no primogeniture coming down from the White House, and leaders and followers split," said Joe Gaylord, a key strategist to Newt Gingrich during the 1994 "Contract with America" campaign.
The fair tax supporters and home-schooling advocates, with their strong and visible preference for Huckabee, are filling the void among grass-roots activists. Huckabee's rise in the polls, activists and analysts say, is a sign that new, decentralized groups are learning to exploit the disarray among the party's old-guard institutions.
When the Home School Legal Defense Association shared its preference for Huckabee with its 80,000 members nationwide, many of them with strong Christian beliefs, most other conservative groups were still sitting on the sidelines.
The home-schooling group counted on its members to spread the word. Home-school parents are accustomed to reaching out to other families within their regions to plan group activities such as curricular fairs and gym days, giving them valuable experience in organizing themselves without a lot of institutional backing. "Things of interest to the home-school community spread like wildfire," said Michael Farris, the association's chairman.
That instinct helps galvanize Iowa home-schoolers in political causes, according to Justin LaVan, a Des Moines lawyer and home-school parent who volunteers as a legislative liaison for the Network of Iowa Christian Home School Educators.
"Many home-school families I know are much more active than other people. They see it as a civic duty and it's important to try to elect leaders who hold the same values families do. They get behind a candidate and support them," said LaVan, who supports Huckabee as a "biblically qualified" figure "who doesn't want to put up barriers or increase control over home-schooling."
At the straw poll, perhaps the most impressive showing by any independent group was from Americans for Fair Taxation, a group founded by Houston businessmen advocating a tax on consumption instead of income. While the group does not endorse a candidate and many second-tier Republican contenders signed on to its agenda, Huckabee benefited the most from the presence of more than 1,000 fair tax supporters the group bused to Ames.
"They were fairly helpful at the straw poll," said Scott Spray, an acting caucus chair for Huckabee in Johnston. "It's one more constituency that has some numbers. Especially because the competition [from former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney] had a big organization and a lot of money, those groups help."
In the early days of a primary season, groups able to commandeer a few thousand organized supporters can find outsized influence in selecting a president, especially in Iowa, where turnout in the party's caucuses is usually between 100,000 and 200,000.
"That was our intent with a primary strategy to make it an issue that was on the radar," said Todd Versteegh, the Americans for Fair Taxation field director in Iowa, one of several early-voting states the group targeted.
Versteegh was following a strategy first employed by the old-guard conservative movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the new primary calendar shifted nominating power from party machines to the grass roots.
"They emerged right at the time that American politics - especially presidential politics - was so susceptible to their influences," said Stephen M. Gillon, a University of Oklahoma historian who has written a forthcoming book about Gingrich. "The process was opening up at the same time the Christian Coalition was organizing and becoming a powerful force. It was able to focus on leveraging political power in a place where candidates were especially vulnerable, in early primary states that had undue influence."
This year, however, key movement figures have chosen different candidates - Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson has endorsed Rudy Giuliani; Moral Majority founder Paul Weyrich has gone with Romney - while some prominent groups like Focus on the Family and the National Rifle Association have yet to pick a side.
In an interview recently in his office, Woolson said he has "not heard much if anything about the NRA" and reached for a Des Moines-area telephone directory when asked about the role of the Christian Coalition.
"Christian church, Christian Science . . . Christian, Christian, Christian, Christian, Christian, Christian," Woolson muttered as he dragged his finger down a page. "I don't know why they wouldn't be listed in the phone book," he said, shrugging. "I don't know what they're up to."
Last year, the Iowa chapter of the Christian Coalition became one of several to break from the national organization amid infighting and financial problems. "They're a disaster, they're not credible anymore," said Steve Scheffler, president of the rechristened Iowa Christian Alliance. "They're out of sync with the base completely."
A Christian Coalition spokesperson did not respond to a call for comment.
The alliance has already distributed its version of the Christian Coalition's famously influential voter guide - which includes candidates' positions on a range of conservative concerns, from abortion to private Social Security accounts. Yet it appears less interested in delivering votes than asserting its "new sense of liberation," as Scheffler put it.
The group is not endorsing a candidate, Scheffler is not personally supporting one, and in the future, all officers are likely to be forbidden from doing so, according to Spray, a board member.
"We don't want to be seen as endorsing one candidate before the primaries are settled," he said.
