Huckabee has a win in sight

Six days ago, John McCain effectively clinched the Republican nomination for president. Media outlets around the globe reported the news. Millions assumed the race was over.

And yet, rival Mike Huckabee thinks he’s still in it.

“This is an election, not a coronation,” a defiant Huckabee said Wednesday as he set out for Wisconsin, site of the next GOP primary.

Day by day, Huckabee has become a growing nuisance to McCain.

“Of course, I would like for him to withdraw today; it would be much easier,” the senator from Arizona told reporters Wednesday at a social club on Capitol Hill. “But I respect his right to remain in this race for just as long as he wants to.”

Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, conceded over the weekend that it would take a miracle for him to get the 1,191 delegates needed to win the nomination. McCain is leading, 843 to 242, according to the Associated Press.

But as he battles onward, Huckabee, 52, is gaining something else: A chance to be seen as a national leader of conservative evangelicals -- a potent force in the Republican Party -- and perhaps as their standard-bearer in a future presidential race.

Fueled by support from evangelicals, he won two Republican contests Saturday -- in Louisiana and Kansas. He gave McCain another scare in Virginia on Tuesday, even though he lost.

Bob Wickers, a Huckabee strategist, said the former Arkansas governor still hoped to best McCain, but added that there were “bigger issues here about the next generation.”

“It’s about conservatives,” Wickers said. “It’s about the movement. It’s about people under-represented in the party who need a voice, and him being that voice.”

If Huckabee can pick up another 39 delegates -- his best shots will come next month in Texas and Mississippi -- he also would get the satisfaction of surpassing the total collected by Mitt Romney, who dropped out of the race.

The price, however, would be more discomfort for McCain.

“You never want to be losing primaries after you’ve kind of locked up the nomination,” said Alan I. Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

In Wisconsin on Wednesday, Huckabee echoed Romney’s argument that McCain -- whom he did not name -- was part of a Washington culture that has failed to address many of America’s problems.

“Now, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me that if . . . [Republican lawmakers] have not done what we told them to do, since they’ve been up there for awhile, that we’d turn the whole presidency over to one of them,” Huckabee told a crowd of 250 who came out to see him in Pewaukee.

By and large, Huckabee has been gentle when drawing contrasts between himself and McCain. But he has not shied from pointing out that McCain originally voted against President Bush’s tax cuts and opposed a constitutional amendment to ban abortion -- both sore spots with conservatives.

Huckabee also has questioned whether McCain shares his commitment to securing the nation’s borders, even though the two have taken largely similar stands on illegal immigration.

But by drawing even mild distinctions, Huckabee is hindering McCain’s efforts to rally conservatives behind his candidacy, analysts say. In the Virginia primary, Huckabee won a majority of conservatives.

“McCain needs to make amends with the base,” said J. Quin Monson, a political scientist at Brigham Young University. “That’s easier to do if they’re not reminded that he’s not as conservative on some issues as Mike Huckabee.”

The Huckabee distraction aside, McCain faces a tough election climate for Republicans: The economy has soured, and the Iraq war -- which McCain supports -- is hugely unpopular. About 7 in 10 Americans say the U.S. is moving in the wrong direction, polls show.

In the general election, a key challenge for McCain will be maintaining his long-standing appeal among independents, while finding ways to inspire a strong turnout of conservatives.

“As long as Huckabee’s in the race, McCain has difficulty doing the latter,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

McCain supporters say Huckabee’s continued presence has an upside. It keeps their candidate in the news at a time when the Democratic nomination fight between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama dominates coverage, and it reminds independents and Democrats that McCain has often strayed from his party. Beyond that, said Ken Khachigian, a lawyer and veteran GOP strategist, “It doesn’t hurt to keep John’s feet to the fire with conservatives.”

Still, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told potential donors in an e-mail Wednesday, the senator needs to “wage an aggressive fight” against Huckabee in Wisconsin, Texas and other states. “The sooner we wrap up this nomination fight,” Davis wrote, “the sooner we can unify our party and begin to face the challenge of defeating the Democrats in the fall.”

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michael.finnegan@latimes.com

Times staff writer James Rainey in Pewaukee, Wis., contributed to this report.