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.

There's more...

Lost amid the Ames Strawpoll activity today, Mitt Romney's campaign has announced the resignation of its national finance committee co-chairman, Alan B. Fabian, who was indicted in Maryland for "allegedly shady business dealings." Romney will return Fabian's $2,300 campaign contribution.

"Federal prosecutors have charged Fabian with defrauding companies out of $32 million. He was indicted Wednesday by a Maryland grand jury on 23 counts, including mail fraud, money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice, according to the Baltimore U.S. attorney's office."

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2007/0 8/11/indicted_romney_finance_cochair_res igns.html

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I found this while looking for info on the voting results (I couldn't find any yet), from a link on the Iowa GOP website.

http://cycloneconservatives.blogspot.com /

This is the official liveblogger for the straw poll, with some short analysis of crowd reactions to speeches.  The thing that interested me the most is that there are so many Ron Paul supporters there.  The guy said that the person doing introductions was having a hard time because his supporters were "everywhere" and really loud.  The liveblogger said that Ron Paul got the biggest reaction of everyone except Romney, but it was just about as loud, and the only thing the crowd did not like was him saying "the national ID was is mistake".

Second, apparently the Huckabee guys showed up strong as well, and they were chanting "I like Mike" He did a lot of Clinton bashing, basically saying that good things can come from Arkansas as well.

Based on this, I stand by my earlier comments of a possible Ron Paul surge or even a Huckabee or Brownback one.  I think that the first two COULD compete with a democrat, but it wont matter.  I say this because Huckabee may be a wingnut and may not believe in evolution, but when he talks about why he doesn't sound crazy.  There is a rationale for him, and with evolution he brings in science and says basically "God started it, whether we evolved I don't know" And Ron Paul is more liberal (although more crazy, since he wants to get rid of I think 5 departments, the IRS, Social Security and some other things.)

I guess we will see over the next few days/weeks.

There's more...

I just thought I would let people know that I have seen a bunch of Ron Paul ads over the last couple of days, mentioning his pro-life credentials.  This combined with reports of Ron Paul supporters using guerrilla tactics to hitch a ride/ticket on Romney's dime.  I think this could set the stage for a strong showing of Ron Paul. Even though Romney is expected to get 80 percent of the vote

Second, I wonder if McCain/Guiliani's decisions to skip the straw poll have in any way influenced their lack of support in the state.

Last, I wonder how many of the candidates will drop out by the end of next week.  My money is on 3. (Thompson, Brownback, and Huckabee)

There's more...

Via the Swamp (Washington bureau blog of the Chicago Tribune):

Last week, the three major presidential campaigns addressed Planned Parenthood: Clinton, Obama, and Elizabeth Edwards. I posted a diary about Obama laying out an agenda for a family-based progressivism that Ezra Klein at TAPPED saw as hinting at the direction of Obama's policy proposals.
After the convention, President Cecile Richards asked members (presumably via email) to go to the website, watch video of the speeches given during the convention, and then answer the simple question: "Who made the best case for women's health?"
Surprisingly, Obama won the poll, garnering 42%. I've been searching around trying to find the percentages for the other two candidates. They don't seem to have been released yet.

Given Clinton's endorsements from Emily's List and NOW and her early support among women voters, she had to be seen as a favorite in the poll.
The online straw poll does not directly affect Planned Parenthood's endorsement:

The poll will not determine the endorsement of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, a spokeswoman said. The group's endorsement will be recommended by its board of directors and ratified by the membership, said the spokeswoman, who declined to be identified.

Partial video of Obama's appearance can be seen here.