Huckabee's weakness

John Fund is looking through the exit poll results from South Carolina and notes how weak Huckabee was outside of his support from evangelical voters.

Once again, Mr. Huckabee failed to achieve significant support outside his evangelical base. Only 1 in 7 non-evangelicals voted for him, placing him behind not just Mr. McCain but Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney. He finished a close second overall only because he won more than 2 out of 5 evangelical voters, who made up 60% of South Carolina's primary turnout. And he pandered to his base, too, running TV ads proclaiming himself a "Christian leader." The vote among voters who considered themselves evangelicals and those who said TV ads were "very important" in determining how they voted was the same: Mr. Huckabee defeated John McCain 43% to 28% in both categories.

This repeats a pattern seen in other states. In Iowa, where evangelicals also were 60% of the electorate, Mr. Huckabee won but carried the votes of only 13% of non-evangelicals. In three states with more secular Republican electorates--New Hampshire, Michigan and Nevada--he has won between 4% and 8% of non-evangelicals, trailing even fringe candidate Ron Paul.

If Huckabee won 2 out of 5 evangelical voters, that means that he lost 3/5 of those votes, mostly to McCain and some to Thompson. He doesn't have much money or much time to do that sort of personal campaigning that helped him in Iowa. If he can't do better than that in South Carolina, other than the few southern states holding primaries on February 5 such as Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Missouri, where can Huckabee make a stand? Perhaps we have seen the end of the whole Huckabee phenomenon.