Herman Cain was the last candidate slated to speak at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, last Sunday morning. The conference, which had been going on since Friday, was scheduled to wrap up shortly afterward. Many of the approximately 1,000 attendees had already voted in the straw poll of presidential candidates.
Rick Perry and Rick Santorum had delivered rousing speeches. Former Colorado GOP congressman Bob Beauprez, representing Mitt Romney, had also spoken. Now it was Cain’s turn.
He delivered.
“Cain gave just a barn-burner of a speech,” says John Andrews, director of the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University, which organized the conference. “A lot of people told me they never dreamed of marking in their straw-poll ballot for Cain before they heard this speech.”
Perry and Santorum had received standing ovations. Cain’s speech drew an even more enthusiastic response: Twice, the crowd stood up in the middle of his speech, applauding wildly.
After the speech, some who had voted for another candidate pleaded to receive their ballots back so they could switch their vote to Cain. “We had people storming the information desk,” Andrews recalls. Ultimately, event organizers decided that attendees would not be allowed to switch their votes.
Nevertheless, Cain decisively won the straw poll, receiving 48 percent of the votes cast. Perry came in second, with 13 percent of the votes. Romney and Santorum tied at 10 percent, and tea-party favorite Michele Bachmann won 9 percent.
Andrews attributes Cain’s win to “a combination of his gifts as a speaker, his luck in the timing, [and] his ability to perfectly read the tea-party mood of the crowd.” The Cain campaign arrived on Sunday morning, shortly before the speech. Because the Cain team had no staff available to attend the full conference in Colorado, Denver county Republicans agreed to pass out Cain materials during the conference. In other words, there was no behind-the-scenes campaign organization pushing conference attendees to vote for Cain.
For Cain, this straw-poll win was just another to add to his impressive record. Starting with his surprise win over Sarah Palin in RedState.com’s presidential-primary bracket, the Godfather’s Pizza mogul has proven to be the king of winning the straw-poll votes of conservative activists. In February, he won among attendees at the Tea Party Patriots’ conference in Arizona. (Ron Paul won among online voters.) In March, Cain triumphed at Republican congressman Steve King’s Conservative Principles Conference held in Iowa, and in July, he won at the Conservative Leadership Conference in Nevada. Along the way, Cain has racked up victories at straw polls held at state and local Republican gatherings in Wisconsin, Hawaii, Washington, and Georgia. It’s no wonder that the Cain campaign needs a spreadsheet to organize Cain’s straw-poll victories.
“To know Herman Cain is to love Herman Cain,” says campaign spokeswoman Ellen Carmichael, noting that Cain’s biggest problem is lack of name recognition, not lack of appeal. (He has won the Gallup Positive Intensity score, which is the difference between a candidate’s favorable and unfavorable numbers, eleven weeks in a row.) Another advantage Cain has is his willingness to travel far and wide to attend and speak at these conferences that feature straw polls. His speaking style, too, may be a factor: Cain, who was a radio host for years, appealingly mixes a common-sense attitude with political rhetoric.
With the exception of the upcoming Ames Straw Poll, the Cain campaign does not pay for supporters’ conference tickets or bus them into conferences. (This was a factor in the Republican Leadership Conference, where the Huntsman campaign did not deny paying for supporters’ conference tickets and Ron Paul bused in supporters.) “Unlike certain other candidates, we do not bus people in or pay them to participate in conference straw polls,” Carmichael says. “Mr. Cain doesn’t feel like that is very honest. He wants to come by his victories honestly.”
That attitude could prove a liability in future, prominent straw polls: At the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Cain placed fourth, while Ron Paul won and Jon Huntsman placed second.
The Ames Straw Poll, of course, is in a category of its own. The Cain campaign acknowledges this: They will bus in and buy tickets for supporters, just as the other candidates do, and they have spent $17,000 to buy a middle-of-the-range location for their supporters to gather in by the arena where the ballots are cast. Unlike other conferences, where the other candidates are unlikely to have an organization apparatus campaigning for votes or even to personally attend, Ames is marked by extensive organization, planning, and plotting beforehand, along with all-day appearances by every candidate participating in the poll.
Cain will face some stiff competition there. He has visited Iowa 25 times in the past year, but many of the other candidates have spent extensive time in the state as well. Both the Pawlenty and Santorum campaigns set aside the bulk of the month before Ames for the candidate to campaign in Iowa. The Pawlenty, Bachmann, and Paul campaigns are running TV and/or radio ads.
The Cain campaign is open about its more minimal approach towards Ames. “We’re not going to spend $1.2 million, as Governor Pawlenty has done. We don’t think it takes that,” Carmichael says. (Recent reports have indicated the Pawlenty campaign is spending about $1 million, although exact numbers have not been released by the campaign.) Cain said yesterday, according to Radio Iowa, that he “need[s] to finish in the top three.”
While Cain won the Iowa Conservative Principles Conference straw poll (Cain had 42 votes to Newt Gingrich’s 16, Pawlenty’s 13, and Bachmann’s 12), that does not portend much about how he will perform at Ames. Craig Robinson, editor of TheIowaRepublican.com and a former political director for the Iowa Republican party, who was present at that conference, notes that back in March, few even thought Bachmann would run.
“This is an organization test where he is going to need to get his people there if he wants to do well. His campaign has had a very rocky go of it in terms of staff leaving, new staff being hired on. Ames is a much more difficult test than who did you like, which is really what happened at [the Conservative Principles Conference],” Robinson observes.
Cain is currently slated to be the last candidate giving a speech at Ames, but attendees are free to cast their vote hours before Cain speaks. For the candidate whose golden tongue has been key to straw-poll triumphs, that last-place slot could hurt his ability to sway attendees’ minds.
That’s because, like the Western Conservative Summit, Ames does not permit vote re-dos. No matter how powerfully Cain inspires people at Ames with his speech, he can win the votes only of those who haven’t cast their ballots yet.
— Katrina Trinko is an NRO reporter.