On Thursday, in a craven move that belied their supposedly rock-ribbed conservative principles, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who won the 2008 and 2012 Iowa GOP caucuses respectively, attended Donald Trump’s shameless self-promotional event at Drake University.
Both men have attempted to portray themselves as true conservatives, but that didn’t prevent them from offering tacit support for a man who is anything but conservative by showing up at his event. Huckabee, of course, has been furious for some time that the money from evangelical sources that propelled his 2008 candidacy has flowed to Ted Cruz, and the chance to stick a shiv in Cruz’s ribs by attending a rally for Cruz’s greatest rival was too juicy for him to pass up. In 2008, CNN reported that entrance polls showed up to 80% of Huckabee’s backers in Iowa were self-identified evangelicals. But when Cruz and Huckabee competed for the evangelical vote in 2015, Cruz virtually swept the field with evangelical endorsements, from Bob Vander Plaats to James Dobson to Tony Perkins to an incredible list of 200 Christian leaders around the nation. Thus Huckabee’s apparent bitterness played a part in supporting Trump.
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