Which Republican is winning the conservative primary?

Anecdotally, there’s excitement for the newer candidates while a sense that time has passed by the older names and people who have run before. The polls are taking the pulse of the voters at large, but at this early stage of the campaign it’s important to consider how party activists feel. They are the people who will be knocking on doors and manning phone banks.

There were two recent gatherings of conservative activists where the attendees were a good reflection of the early states’ demographics: the Southern Republican Leadership Conference and the Western Conservative Summit (both more evangelical than New Hampshire, but not that dissimilar from Iowa or South Carolina).

In both places, Carson supporters were thick on the ground. I hadn’t even landed in Oklahoma City, where the Southern Republican confab was held, before I encountered my first person telling me “Dr. Carson” would make a good president. A mostly older, entirely white group of activists clad in Carson t-shirts and snapping selfies with a life-sized cutout of the candidate worked the room in support of the only African American running seriously running for president in either party.