Mike Huckabee (R-ARK) is considering a presidential run in 2016. He has stepped away from his lucrative Fox News show so that he can ponder the possibilities. (Fox does not allow employees to run for office while under contract.) Indications are that he will jump into the contest.

Huckabee is, without challenge, the standard-bearer for the evangelical right. Huckabee was a Southern Baptist pastor before he got into politics. Huckabee visited Cedarville, where I teach, in 2013, and was welcomed like a rock star by the more than 2,000 in attendance. Huckabee speaks easily of faith and he, more adroitly than any rival, connects faith and politics in an unforced manner.

There is much speculation about both Huckabee’s chances and his possible impact on the race. Ramesh Ponnuru, at National Review Online, suspects that Huckabee will need to run a very different kind of race, compared to the one he ran in 2008, to have any hope of capturing enough delegates to win. He essentially argues that Huckabee will need to appeal to more non-evangelical voters to stand a chance. Glenn Beck is convinced that Huckabee will fracture the vote and destroy Ted Cruz’s, and maybe any staunch conservative’s, chances of winning the contest.

Huckabee has a few factors going for him. First, his stature within the GOP’s base has likely increased since he ran in 2008. His weekly show has certainly not diminished his presence and, if anything, it has given him a chance to speak to more than evangelicals. Second, as Scott Conroy notes at Real Clear Politics, the primary calendar may bolster Huckabee in 2016. More southern states are moving up in the line of contests, and this should solidify his early appeal and perhaps allow Huckabee to build momentum, which, though difficult to define, seems key in the early stages of the nomination process. Third, Huckabee does not suffer from a charisma deficit. He is engaging, interesting, and likable. Most of the GOP field will be unable to match Huckabee’s ability to cast a positive image, especially on tv. Huckabee’s strength will be the weakness of potential opponents like Scott Walker (WI) and Mitt Romney (MA).

Do his 2008 results help us understand how he might do in 2016? Huckabee won around 19 percent of the primary and caucus voters,* earning him a third place result behind McCain and Romney. There was, unsurprisingly, a significant (.51) correlation between Huckabee’s performance and the state’s evangelical population.** So, states that have higher rates of evangelicals furnished more Huckabee voters. Not exactly a revelation.

These results are a bit deceptive, however, and probably understate his reliance on evangelicals. If we only look at the contests that were competitive, before Huckabee had withdrawn from the race (he did so on March 4), we see a slightly different picture. In these 39 cases, Huckabee’s average creeps up to 23.5 percent, but, at the same time, the correlation between the state’s evangelical population and Huckabee’s vote totals climbs (.69) even higher.

Interestingly, at least to people like me, the states were not markedly different, at least in terms of their evangelicalism, when we view them before and after Huckabee dropped out of the contest. Before he withdrew, the states had an average evangelical population of 16%, compared to an average population of 15.1% after he withdrew. This suggests that many evangelicals who would have supported Huckabee went to McCain, naturally, after Huckabee stopped competing.

So, to what degree were Huckabee’s results dependent on evangelicals? The mean evangelical state population in this analysis was right at 16%. For states above that mean, Huckabee won 31% of the vote and for states below that figure, he won 14% of the vote. That is, in a primary contest, often the difference between first and third place.

What do we make of this?

In a multi-candidate contest, Huckabee will be formidable in states that have meaningful evangelical populations. However, at least three viable candidates have to emerge in order for Huckabee to get the maximum benefit from evangelical support. Why? More candidates will give a higher probability that non-evangelicals will fragment, thereby making Huckabee’s evangelical block more likely to boost him into first or second place in a contest. This means that Huckabee is very likely to survive the first winnowing process.

The calendar, as noted above, is shifting in a way that is favorable to Huckabee. Though Iowa and South Carolina have historically been early, Florida, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas also appear to be moving up in the cycle, and all of those states are “high” evangelical states (they have an average evangelical population of almost 30% among them), which should help Huckabee stay in the race longer than in 2008.

Given everything at play, I think, barring a rival for the religious vote, Huckabee will thrive in the early stages of the contest. How he handles that moment will define his chances. As he emerges as one of the last two or three candidates standing, he will need to have the means (financial and rhetorical) to expand his base of support to challenge a more traditional opponent.

The key may be how “new” candidates are able to construct support. If Marco Rubio (FL), or Ted Cruz (TX), or Rand Paul (KY) run, how will they play among evangelicals? Will they be able to galvanize non-evangelical support so that Huckabee’s chances are diminished? Or, more likely, will more candidates fracture the vote so much that someone who can rely on a consistent core of voters be able to win early contests?

We don’t know the answers to these questions. We don’t even know who might run in 2016. Perhaps even Huckabee will choose not to get in. The only guarantee we have is that we will have a presidential primary in 2016 and that it will be fascinating.

*The results are based on quick calculations based on 49 results. Hawaii’s caucus results are not reported publicly and the caucus goers are not polled for their individual preferences, which makes it difficult to use Hawaii’s outcomes in the analysis. All other primaries and caucus results are factored in, with the caucus results being treated the same as primary outcomes.

**Evangelical population is derived from the rate of evangelical denominational adherence according to the ASARB, the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. The data are reported and collected at the Association of Religious Data Archives (www.thearda.com).