In an opinion piece this week in National Review Online, S.T. Karnick suggests that two trends may help long-shot Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee actually win the presidency. Huckabee placed second in the recent Iowa straw poll despite barely registering a national blip in the race against better-known and better-financed candidates such as Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.

The first trend, Karnick states, is that governors usually win the presidency, while senators (most of the other candidates) usually do not:

The reasons governors beat national politicians are probably fairly simple. They have accomplishments they can cite, have served as CEO of a large government organization (as the U.S. presidency is), and, most importantly, they don't have a voting record on important and controversial national issues.Senators, by contrast, don't have the individual political-administrative accomplishments to which to point, have records dotted with controversial and polarizing votes, ...

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