It’s hard to bounce around among candidate events like I did in N.H. First, I don’t have my road buddy Nancy Gibbs here to help me navigate. Second, the events all seem to be four hours driving time from each other.
So here’s the limited report: I’m typing this while I await a Huckabee appearance at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, which is about nine miles south of Charlotte, N.C. There were several hundred people here a half-hour before Huckabee’s scheduled appearance, which is a marked contrast from the somewhat listless and much smaller McCain crowd that I saw around noon in Myrtle Beach. (That was at a community recreation center, where I counted about a dozen additional people in the fitness center, too wrapped up in a cable news report about the economic slump on cable news to leave their treadmills and come see the candidate in the next room.) The Huckabee crowd is very different from McCain’s, not just in the size of it, but also in the age. These folks are much, much younger (relatively few appear to be college students from here on campus), lots of families and the stage is jammed with little kids.
Of course, these are different parts of the state, different times of day. And I learned in New Hampshire not to draw too much from the crowds. Obama’s were bigger and more excited than Clinton’s; she beat him on election day. But from this purely unscientific sample, this would suggest these two guys are appealing to very different constituencies, and that the Huckabee intensity is greater.
Meanwhile, I discover I’m sitting with a couple of mass communications majors, one of whom plans to vote for McCain and the other for Huckabee. I’m debating whether I should interview them, or try to persuade them to change majors before it’s too late…