With Mike Huckabee now officially out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, it’s worth considering which other candidates might benefit from a lack of Huck.
Recent polling had shown the former Arkansas governor in the high teens, drawing large blocks of support in Southern states and from more religious and socially conservative corners of the GOP.
To study which candidates could get the most benefit from Huckabee’s departure, the New York Times’ Nate Silver drew up a chart and assigned values to several variables.
Click here to check his work. It’s worth reading through, but the bottom-line conclusion seems to be that this could open a door for Herman Cain to walk through. Both Huckabee and Cain are evangelical Protestants from the South who are also outsider politicians. Both appeal directly to value voters and both were planning to make Iowa the key to launching their campaigns.
So, while Mitt Romney is probably happy not to have a forced rematch with Huckabee in Iowa, the real winner of the day could be the unlikely Herman Cain, a former Godfathers Pizzas head who many believe won the first debate of GOP candidates that aired on Fox News recently.
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