Mike Huckabee has won the caucus in West Virginia and the primaries in Georgia, Tennesee, Alabama and Arkansas making him the first winner of a Super Tuesday 2008 contest. It looks like supporters of John McCain decided to take the long view to best support their candidate; after McCain placed third behind Romney and Huckabee, the Arizona Senator's supporters switched their support to Huckabee, putting the former Arkansas governor over the top and earning him 18 delegates in the West Virginia race. He also won the primaries in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas.
The McCain camp is demonstrating a pretty shrewd command of electoral math, figuring that if this going to be a long race to the nomination, it's better to keep Huckabee around to siphon support from Romney than take the multi-millionaire self-financing candidate on head-to-head. It would be an understatement to say that Huckabee has outperformed expectations.
It's true that from this point forth his candidacy is essentially a buffer between Romney and McCain, but the fact that Huckabee, this guy from nowhere, who started with no name recognition and no money, won another contest and will make it to tomorrow is astounding. It's hard to imagine what future roll Huckabee has, but it's hard to imagine he'll stray to far from wherever in the action is in Republican politics for the next few years.
