Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's surge in Iowa, from single digits in the polls to a virtual tie for the lead among Republicans, has captivated the political world and prompted speculation about just how he did it.
The Fix may have found the answer: a physician from Montgomery, Ala., named Randy Brinson.
Brinson is the keeper of a massive e-mail list of much-coveted Christian voters that Huckabee is using to reach and organize people in early-voting states such as Iowa.
Brinson's list numbers about 71 million contacts, with 25 million identified as belonging to "25 and 45 years old, upwardly mobile, right-of-center, conservative households," he said.
The list was constructed for GOTV and voter registration purposes during 2004 using publicity around Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ. Here is why this is mind-blowing. First, the list has 414,000 contact in Iowa alone, which is stunning. Second, if it is still active enough to play a major role in swinging a presidential nomination contest, what was it doing for the previous three years? Third, all of this has been taking place so under the radar, that there isn't even a wiki entry on Randy Brinson. I mean, there is a wiki entry on me, for crying out loud, and there isn't one on some guy with the largest functional email list in the entire country. How did the continuing operation of a list this size go so under the radar? There are 71 million contacts on the list--everyone should know about it.
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