By Rachel Kapochunas, CQ Staff

John McCain had the momentum coming out of the recent Super Tuesday presidential voting spree, but most of the Republican voters who participated in three states’ nominating events Saturday showed they are not rushing to jump on the Arizona senator’s bandwagon.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — who had confirmed before an audience of conservative activists in Washington, D.C., on Saturday that he is pressing forward with his challenge to McCain — easily won that day’s caucuses in Kansas and also won a close victory over McCain in the Louisiana primary.

In Washington, the state Republican Party declared McCain a narrow winner over Huckabee after hours of vote counting. But even there, McCain was ahead with a very modest 25.4 percent to 23.8 percent for Huckabee with 93 percent of the vote reported, according to results posted on the state party’s Web site Sunday night.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul , who has drawn an activist constituency around his libertarian philosophy and opposition to the war in Iraq, had 20.7 percent, which would be his second-best showing in any Republican primary or caucus so far. He had 24.5 percent of the vote in the Montana caucuses on Feb. 5.

And in perhaps the most interesting sidelight to the voting in Washington, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney had 16.7 percent of the vote, even though he suspended his campaign on Thursday after his subpar Super Tuesday performance — suggesting that many of his supporters are not yet prepared to swing behind either McCain or Huckabee.

McCain’s strong showings in early primaries have not dispelled the opposition expressed toward him among many in the Republican Party’s sizable conservative activist wing, whom he alienated by breaking publicly with GOP orthodoxy on issues such as immigration, the environment and campaign finance regulation, and who resented his “maverick” challenge to George W. Bush , then the darling of the conservative wing, in the race for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination.

Saturday’s results indicate that McCain still has quite a way to go in mending fences with this constituency, even after his outreach Thursday at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. — the same event at which Huckabee spoke on Saturday.

Citing a remark he made to CPAC about McCain’s overall lead in delegates, Huckabee said in a statement Saturday night, “Earlier this morning, I said I didn’t major in math, I majored in miracles. It looks like my victory in Kansas is one of them.” The “miracles” reference pertains to the fact that Huckabee, whose strongest appeal has been among his fellow religious conservatives, is an ordained Baptist minister.

Huckabee amplified on these remarks in an interview on NBC-TV’s Meet the Press program Sunday morning. “If our party can’t have a thoughtful discussion and some meaningful debate and dialogue about the issues important to us as a party, then we’re really not prepared to lead,” Huckabee said. “I am prepared to lead. That’s why I’m in this race. And I think I’ve got to continue to make the case.”

Huckabee continued, “There are people who got me here with far fewer resources than other campaigns. And the Democrats haven’t settled their nominee either. So for us to suddenly act like that we have to all step aside and have a coronation instead of an election, that’s the antithesis of everything Republicans are supposed to believe. We believe that competition breeds excellence and that the lack of it breeds mediocrity.”

But Huckabee, if he is to surge into serious contention and foil McCain’s effort to clinch a majority of the delegates to the Republican National Convention that will be held in September, will have to show he can defeat the front-runner on turf less favorable than the three states in which they ran on Saturday.

Caucus events, such as those in Kansas and Washington, tend to draw lower turnouts than primaries and thus can be strongly influenced by candidates such as Huckabee who have strong activist bases. The day’s one primary, in Louisiana, was in Huckabee’s native South, where he has run best and where many in the Republican voting base are evangelical Christians.

Huckabee dominated the GOP caucuses in Kansas on Saturday afternoon, capturing 60 percent of 19,516 votes cast. McCain received 24 percent and Paul had 11 percent. Romney received 3 percent. Kansas will send a total of 39 delegates to the national convention.

Christian Morgan, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, said he believes that Huckabee’s decision to heavily campaign in the state Friday contributed to his strong finish.

With nearly all precincts reporting in Louisiana, Huckabee received 43 percent and McCain received 42 percent, with a 2,056-vote margin between the two. Romney garnered 6 percent; the 5 percent for Paul was more typically of his showings in the campaign’s higher-turnout primary events.

Because no candidate garnered 50 percent of the vote, the at-large delegates that might have been allocated based on the primary results will remain “uncommitted,” meaning they are not be bound to a particular candidate. Louisiana’s Republicans have a total of 47 delegates.

Exit polling showed that voters who consider themselves to be conservative made up 71 percent of Republican primary voters in Louisiana, and 51 percent of voters were white/evangelical or born-again Christians. Those voters favored Huckabee.

The Democrats also held three presidential nominating events Saturday, caucuses in Washington and Nebraska and a primary in Louisiana. Illinois Sen. Barack Obama scored a sweep over New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in those contests, which he rounded out on Sunday by easily winning the Democratic caucuses in Maine.

There was another definitive outcome in the contrast between Republican and Democratic turnout, which echoed the “enthusiasm gap” between the parties’ voters that has been seen in most states throughout the campaign so far. In the complete but unofficial returns, 384,348 Democrats and 161,319 Republicans had voted in the Louisiana primary.

Obama alone had 220,588 votes, greatly exceeding all the Republican candidates combined. Clinton’s 136,241 votes running second in the Democratic primary almost exactly matched the combined total for Huckabee and McCain.

CQ Politics’ Greg Giroux, Bob Benenson and Jessica Benton Cooney contributed to this story.