Home-School Ties Aided Huckabee's Iowa Rise

Home-school parent Erin Hartman, left, talks about Mike Huckabee's Iowa campaign with Julie Roe, an early supporter who created her own Huckabee campaign literature and tapped a network of home-schoolers to boost his candidacy. (By Peter Slevin -- The Washington Post)

The ad, which began running Nov. 19, drew laughs, attention and more money. The campaign followed with a spot that makes a direct appeal to the conservative faithful, flashing "Christian Leader" on the screen in large letters.

When a group of more than three dozen pastors in Iowa endorsed Huckabee in early December, it solidified his standing as the leading candidate among conservative Christians in the state. Yet the ministers were trailing their flocks, whose enthusiasm for Huckabee was already showing up in polls.

By this week, polls showed him ahead by 2 to 1 in Iowa and close in South Carolina and Florida.

Just weeks before the Jan. 3 caucuses, Romney's aides are counting on their larger, more formal structure to out-duel Huckabee's seat-of-the-pants operation.

Huckabee supporters, meanwhile, are debating whether his ground-up Iowa model can work in the rest of the country. Last weekend, he attended a rally in South Carolina sponsored in part by home-schoolers and headed to Florida to campaign.

"Home-schoolers organize in every state," Farris said, "so the ability to build fast networks in every state is very realistic."

Yet New Hampshire, which votes Jan. 8, has no comparable base of conservative Christian activists. And, for now at least, Huckabee's campaign treasury is dwarfed by the amounts that Romney and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani are prepared to spend on television ads in parts of the country where Huckabee is largely unknown.

Comparing today with Huckabee's place in the race a few months ago, his early Iowa supporters are overjoyed, even if there is an occasional bittersweet moment. The other day, Roe drove 80 miles to Des Moines to see Huckabee but could not get near him because of the news media thronging around the new front-runner.

"This is what we believed would happen," said Roe, who is organizing a Dec. 20 rally in central Iowa. "But I do miss the days when we could have a cup of coffee at the Pizza Ranch and sit down and talk."