“How you doing?” Mr. Huckabee said, smiling a toothy grin already labeled so Jim Nabors-like that their names appear in about 600 Google matches.

The child of a farming region where success is built more on regularity and repetition, Mr. Crawford seemed startled by Mr. Huckabee, the embodiment of Big Momentum.

“Just want to say you got my vote,” Mr. Crawford said before moving off.

He told a reporter later he was surprised at how “normal and regular” Mr. Huckabee seemed. “Funny, too.”

On the campaign trail, Mr. Huckabee is a polished performer who can be funny, endearingly self-deprecating and acute enough to move his audience to tears when he wants. With a voice that toggles between Tom Bodett’s comforting sound and Paul Harvey’s friendly authority, Mr. Huckabee speaks without notes and is never at a loss for a memorable phrase. (“We should put wingtips on the ground before we put the boots on the ground,” he says, describing how he would wage foreign policy. “We should be able to tell the Saudis we no more need their oil than we need their sand,” he says, describing his energy policy.)

But he does not light up a room the way some charismatic politicians, like a Barack Obama, might. He warms it up.

“I would say he’s more personable and congenial than anything else,” said Howard Taylor, 52, a community college instructor in West Des Moines. “He’s the candidate who believes certain things the way I do, and for the same reasons I do. He doesn’t have to be electrifying.”

Somehow, the very lack of magnetism and fieriness has become one of the hallmarks of Mr. Huckabee’s campaign persona. He is the social conservative who is “not mad at anybody,” the Christian who does not rail against “happy holiday” cards issuing from the White House, but just puts on a red sweater and makes a campaign advertisement with “Silent Night” playing in the background.