The Family Research Council's "values voters" summit concluded today with an onsite straw poll that found Mike Huckabee winning with a majority of support.

Mike Huckabee    488    51.26%Mitt Romney    99     10.40%Fred Thompson    77     8.09%Tom Tancredo    65     6.83%Rudy Giuliani    60     6.30%Duncan Hunter     54     5.67%John McCain     30     3.15%Sam Brownback     26     2.73%Ron Paul     25     2.63%Undecided     11     1.16%Not Voting     7     0.74%

He absolutely crushed the field, giving further proof that, as Jerome's Breaking Blue headline puts it: Huckabee becoming theocon choice. The result might have come as no surprise to anyone who was in attendance at the event, as his speech was met with rave reviews. David Brody of CBN describes it this way:

Finally, he came with a very straightforward purpose. He told the crowd that he's one of them. He is a value voter. The crowd gave him standing ovation after standing ovation.

The speech was part policy, part tent revival. He was in full Pastor mode throwing out the Bible references left and right. The people I talked to afterwards were very impressed.

RedState raves as well (h/t Race42008).

Expect Mitt Romney to declare victory in the FRC straw poll as well, however, as they held an online straw poll and the combined results gave Romney a slight win over Huckabee.

Mitt Romney1595 27.62%Mike Huckabee156527.15%Ron Paul86514.98%Fred Thompson5649.77%Undecided3295.7%Sam Brownback2975.14%Duncan Hunter 1402.42%Tom Tancredo 1332.3%Rudy Giuliani 1071.85%John McCain811.4%

But truthfully, this too should be seen as a win for Huckabee. To quote RedState:

In the online poll that the Romney campaign pushed hard to win, he only managed to get thirty more votes than Mike Huckabee.

While Huckabee certainly is the story here, Thompson's and McCain's results are notable as well. Clearly Thompson bombed among a constituency he was widely considered to be courting. And look at poor old John McCain, a faithful "pro-life" Republican all these years only to fall below the pro-choice guy among voters who hold opposition to abortion rights above all other issues. Their distrust of McCain appears to be truly irrevocable.

As a sidenote, the Democrats were included in the straw poll and Obama did best with 5 onsite votes, just ahead of Kucinich and Dodd who had 2 votes each and Biden who had one.

Update [2007-10-20 17:57:15 by Todd Beeton]: Oh yeah, and to give you a sense of just what it was that made the fundies go crazy for Huckabee this weekend, CNN has a wrap-up of his speech. Upshot: abortion is a holocaust and discrimination should be enshrined into the constitution:

"Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce," the former Arkansas governor said. "It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973."

Huckabee also spoke adamantly of the need for conservative lawmakers to show no compromise on fighting for a constitutional amendment that defines marriage between a man and a woman. "I'm very tired of hearing people who are unwilling to change the constitution, but seem more than willing to change the holy word of God as it relates to the definition of marriage," he said.

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