It should be interesting if Huckabee can keep this up in the weeks ahead. If his poll numbers keep on rising in the weeks ahead, he will definitely shake up the Republican race. However, I still don't think he will win the Republican primary.

Huckabee Rising

Even if he hadn’t released a campaign video featuring legendary actor, tough guy and TotalGym user Chuck Norris, Mike Huckabee would still be big news. Since August, his poll numbers have risen steadily, and his support nationwide now approaches that of Mitt Romney, John McCain and Fred Thompson.

I’ve gone ahead and whipped up some exclusive Forbes numbers to explain just how dramatic his rise has been.

Back on Aug. 1, Huckabee was about even with Ron Paul in the polls, both of them languishing in—to put it politely—the "colorful" category. Things are different now, as a glance at the graph below reveals.

After a series of lackluster performances by Fred Thompson, who saw his poll numbers peak just as he announced his candidacy, social conservatives began to look for candidates they could love more, and they may have found one in the doe-eyed minister/governor from Arkansas.

Huckabee’s rise is significant; a quick statistical test suggests that there’s less than a 1 in 1,000 chance that his recent trend is due to random variation in polls. He has gained, on average, 0.07 percentage points per day since Aug. 1 (that’s a little over half the rate at which Thompson has lost support since Sept. 12, when he may have reached his political zenith on the national level).

At their rates of change since Sept. 12, Huckabee would surpass Thompson in popularity before the end of the year—on Dec. 13, by my calculations. (Of course, at those rates, Huckabee would have 110% of Republican voters’ support in June 2010. Obviously, you can only go so far with these predictions.)

The above analysis does not take into account the order of the primary contests. Huckabee currently polls in second place in Iowa, the state that was one-time Democratic front-runner Howard Dean’s undoing in 2004. Huckabee doesn’t poll particularly well in other early-primary states, but primary polls are remarkably fickle and could see some abrupt changes before voters actually cast their ballots.

Ron Paul also saw a bump in his poll numbers earlier this month, when the political world issued a collective gasp after he raised over $4 million in one day. My statistical software is warning me that I should withhold comment for a little while, though. Paul’s upward trend, while sharp (he’s gained, on average, 0.12 percentage points per day in polls since late October), isn’t particularly robust, so it’s difficult to sort real movement out of the noise.

Unlike Democrats, who have had a relatively stable field this year (the top three candidates of last January are still the top three candidates), Republicans have seen lots of reversals. My guess is that the Republican race will involve much more instability before the party settles on a candidate. Stay tuned.

--Jon Bruner