People with presidential ambitions don’t often walk away from a lead in the polls and a chance to win. Colin Powell did. Mario Cuomo did. And now Mike Huckabee has, too. But Huckabee’s departure hasn’t diminished GOP voters’ desire for a Huckabee-like candidate. To political professionals, that means a candidate who can appeal to social conservatives, mostly in the South. But people who have worked with Huckabee know that it’s something more than that, and it’s not terribly complicated: A lot of voters are looking for a candidate they can like as much as they liked the former governor of Arkansas.
“Yes, you had social conservatives who gravitated toward his strong pro-life and marriage views,” says Chip Saltsman, who ran Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign and was prepared to join up again had Huckabee decided to run. “But there were a lot of voters who were drawn by his pure charismatic ability to attract people. We had a lot of people on the team who were just drawn to him. They thought he was such a unique guy that once they met him they couldn’t help supporting him.”
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Huckabee’s personality was probably the reason he won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, rocketing him for a time to the front of the GOP presidential pack. For his supporters, he made it seem (almost) fun not to have any money or any big-time consultants or any staff. And he enjoyed making fun of the candidates who did.
The straw poll in Ames, Iowa, was the first test in the Republican race in 2007. The nominal front-runner, Mitt Romney, spent zillions of dollars campaigning, paying for fleets of buses to take voters to Ames and tons of barbecue to feed them once they were there. Huckabee, of course, had no money for any of that. So he got on the radio and urged his supporters to ride Romney’s buses, eat Romney’s barbecue — and vote for Huckabee. It worked; Huckabee came in a surprise second and was on his way to winning Iowa.
The night before the caucuses, Huckabee’s bare-bones headquarters in downtown Des Moines looked more like a day-care center than a war room. The place was filled with volunteers who seemingly had all brought children. There was as much socializing as phone-banking, and everyone seemed to share a personal bond with Huckabee. They just liked Mike.
After Huckabee won Iowa, he didn’t have the time to build a lasting campaign. In that year’s crazy schedule, the New Hampshire primary was just five days after the Iowa contest. Huckabee hung on for a while but couldn’t create any nationwide momentum.
What would a Huckabee presidential run have looked like this time around? “A lot bigger,” says Saltsman. “We wouldn’t have been just an Iowa-centric campaign. We would have been able to spread out all around the country and run a truly national campaign, because he is a national figure now. He was much more of a regional guy back then.”
But would Huckabee in 2012 — a candidate with money, name ID and press attention — have appealed to voters as much as he did before? Some of Huckabee’s attractiveness back then came from his role as underdog, doing something with nothing. That wouldn’t have been the case in ’12, and the appeal might have faded a little.
It’s also possible that if Huckabee had run, the race might have turned into a death match with Romney — never a pleasing prospect. In ’08 Huckabee personally liked several of his fellow candidates, but Romney wasn’t one of them. One semi-joking explanation of Huckabee’s decision not to run is that he saw that Romney is already in so much trouble that he doesn’t need Mike Huckabee to make any more for him.
Is Huckabee finished with politics? Even though this seems like the end, there’s no reason to declare his political career over. Saltsman is a former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, and he recalls a series of lunches with former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander after Alexander’s presidential campaign fizzled out. “He really thought he was never going to run again,” Saltsman says of Alexander, “and then a Senate race came up.” Alexander won a seat in 2002 and has become a leading Republican in the Senate.
There might be some opportunity out there for Huckabee, too. “He is young enough,” says Saltsman of Huckabee, who is now 55. “You just never know what the future might hold for him.”
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at [email protected].
