Mike Huckabee is 11 points above Mitt Romney and now 17 points above last month’s leader, Rudy Giuliani, in SurveyUSA’s latest South Carolina Republican Primary polling.

What’s behind what everyone is calling a surge? Is it actually real, or is it just reaction to the polling being reported elsewhere?

Well, why can’t it be both?

More after the cut…

Remember, polls are snapshots in time. This poll was conducted from Friday 12/7 to Sunday 12/9. While the three Mason-Dixon polls didn’t break until Sunday morning — by which point our polling was more than 3/4 complete — the Newsweek poll showing Huckabee beating Romney 2:1 in Iowa was out on Friday, and definitely could have had some influence. While Huckabee’s numbers were relatively steady across all three days of polling, he did do marginally better on Friday and Sunday — the poll release days — than he did on Saturday. There’s no way to tell if there’s any correlation there, and in any case, none of the movement was outside the poll’s margin of error — but those other polls are definitely events that were taking place during the time this snapshot was taken.

How do polls move races? By showing voters that someone they hadn’t previously paid attention to is a viable candidate and getting them to take a first look at him. If they like what they see, they might well tell us they’d vote for him. Keep in mind that for the vast majority of Americans, Mike Huckabee is an unknown. He’s conservative; he’s an ordained minister; he’s the former governor of Arkansas — all broad, biographical bullet points, none of them necessarily off-putting to Republican primary voters. In the same way that Fred Thompson’s official entry into the race caused people to notice him and tell pollsters they were interested, Huckabee’s surge in the Newsweek and Mason-Dixon polls could be doing the same thing for him right now.

And then there’s the elephant in the room:

Half of South Carolina registered voters tell us it’s very (21%) or somewhat (29%) important that a candidate for president share their religion.

Something like 1 in 4 South Carolinians are Southern Baptists. Less than 1/4 of 1% are Mormons.

It’s a snapshot in time — but it’s a better time (and place) to be a Southern Baptist than a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Huckabee right now doesn’t have the high negatives drawn out by months of top-tier campaigning; while there’s clearly some behind-the-scenes scrambling to get some negative news out there, this particular polling snapshot precedes those efforts, and also happens to come after a fairly drawn out series of negative reports on Giuliani. The next series of polling on Huckabee — the snapshots taken after he’s been seen as the front-runner for a week or two — those will be the polls that let us know if voters continue to like what they see. (Confirming this: Drudge today posts a piece mentioning the number of press releases put out by the Democratic National Committee on each of the Republican front-runners; Mitt Romney has been the topic of 99, and Giuliani the topic of 74 — Huckabee has been the topic of 4.)

Full results, crosstabs, and tracking graphs are here. Research conducted for WCSC-TV Charleston and WSPA-TV Greenville.