By Bob Benenson, CQ Staff

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee slipped past ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on the second ballot at the West Virginia Republican presidential nominating convention, taking a narrow majority to overcome Romney’s first-round plurality and claiming the state’s 18 at-large national convention delegates in the winner-take-all contest.

Huckabee entered the convention with a solid base, particularly among religious conservatives, to whom the former Southern Baptist preacher has targeted his strongest appeal. This constituency is well-represented with the state GOP’s ranks.

But it appears some good old-fashioned political horse-trading between the Huckabee camp and supporters of John McCain and Ron Paul aided Huckabee in overcoming the 41 percent to 33 percent lead Romney held over him in the first ballot at the convention in West Virginia’s capital city of Charleston.

West Virginia news media are reporting that in exchange for his support, Huckabee will give Paul three of the 18 delegates he secured today.

McCain, who did not compete heavily in West Virginia, took 15 percent on the first ballot, finishing ahead of only Texas Rep. Ron Paul , who had 10 percent and was eliminated from contention under the convention’s rules. Yet the final tally in the second-ballot vote showed McCain plummeting to 1 percent, while Huckabee shot ahead of Romney by 52 percent to 47 percent -- giving the former Arkansas governor the majority he needed to clinch victory in a winner-take-all contest that netted him the state’s 18 at-large delegates to this summer’s Republican National Convention. Nine more delegates will be selected in a May 13 primary and three more by party officials.

The Associated Press, reporting from the scene, said most of the McCain delegates shifted to Huckabee -- preventing Romney, McCain’s top rival for the Republican nomination, from claiming victory in the first of 21 states holding Super Tuesday Republican primaries and caucuses today.

Huckabee, who scored his first victory since the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses Jan. 3, has recently been engaged in campaign hostilities with Romney. The former Massachusetts governor has publicly suggested that longshot Huckabee drop out of the race in order to allow Romney to galvanize support among Republican conservatives. Many of those conservatives continue to express skepticism or outright opposition to McCain despite the latter’s emergence as the putative front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination. Huckabee has angrily rejected Romney’s contention as “arrogant.”

Romney, Huckabee and Paul all personally appeared and spoke to the delegates at the West Virginia convention. McCain did not.

Bob Fish, the CEO of the West Virginia Republican presidential convention, said that the convention’s scheduling owed to a desire to give West Virginia Republicans more influence over the 2008 nomination process in a state where President Bush won key victories in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

“By having our convention and having it placed early in the day on Super Tuesday, this gave us the opportunity to achieve that,” Fish told CQ Politics. “And so our convention style ‑‑ winner‑take‑all, majority [vote] required to win ‑‑ was successful in attracting three of the four candidates.”

Fish wasn’t privy to delegates’ thinking between ballots one and two. But he said he wasn’t surprised by the result. “People like to be with a winner. People also reassess whether the first choice is the one that they want to push ahead; sometimes that’s the way it happens. Other look at the second-choice candidate and say, ‘no, that’s a clearer choice for me.’ I just say that’s a not unusual activity to happen in elections like this, and frankly I found that, had it gone for Governor Romney or Governor Huckabee, either one of those would not have been unexpected.”

Greg Giroux contributed to this story.

Super Tuesday results and analysis will be updated throughout the day and night on Bob Benenson’s blog, Net Results.