Home-Schoolers Help Propel Huckabee

Dec. 11, 2007 — -- DES MOINES — Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's rise may have been a surprise to many, but not to a tightly knit group of social conservatives with something fundamental in common.

Thousands of evangelical Christians who school their children at home have found a candidate they can support in Huckabee, and they provide the former Arkansas governor's outsider campaign with hundreds of volunteers.

Although not monolithic, home-schooling Republicans are united by core principles, especially rejection of public schools in favor of their own religious-based teaching. Likewise, they are civically active and well connected to evangelical churches, themselves a powerful political network.

As a small subset of social conservatives, home-school activists are too few to account for Huckabee's entire vault to contender in the Republican field.

But in Iowa, home-school activists number in the thousands and could make the difference in a close contest Jan. 3, when Iowa's precinct caucuses kick off the presidential nominating process.

"They stand for the same things, and they trust each other," Christine Hurley, a Pleasant Hill Republican active in the state's home-school network, said of Huckabee and home-schoolers. "When you understand he's a Baptist minister, you don't have to ask what he stands for."

When Huckabee returned to Iowa last week, he had climbed 20 percentage points since Labor Day in polls of Iowa Republican caucusgoers.

An Iowa campaign staff of just 14 met him. He also encountered a pack of national media trying to determine how Huckabee had leapfrogged better-financed candidates Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson to take the lead in The Des Moines Register''s Iowa Poll. Huckabee raised only $1 million in the third quarter of 2007.

"Where we don't have offices and paid staff, we have something even better," Huckabee said in Des Moines last week. "We have an army of ordinary people who are out there not because someone is paying them to love me."

Huckabee's surge appears to be built on popularity with the most loyal social conservatives and their newfound belief that he could win Iowa's caucuses.