The first time former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee announced he was running for president, on Jan. 28, 2007, he did it on “Meet the Press.” Doing so had two advantages. One, it reached the political junkies who watched what was then the leading Sunday talk show. And two, it was really cheap, which was helpful for a campaign with no money.
That was then. Now, Huckabee, having sat out the 2012 race while making a good living and keeping his hand in public affairs as host of a popular Fox News weekend program, is set to announce a second presidential candidacy in a dramatically different way. The difference says a lot about Huckabee 2007 versus Huckabee 2015.
Huckabee will announce in his hometown of Hope, Arkansas. Like the “Meet the Press” rollout, that has two advantages. One, it showcases the now-prosperous Huckabee’s humble origins. And two, it juxtaposes Huckabee with likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Hope being legendarily associated with Bill “Man from Hope” Clinton.
Unlike the bare-bones 2007 announcement, this time Huckabee’s nascent campaign has reserved a block of rooms for reporters in a downtown Little Rock hotel, arranged a dinner for the press the night before the announcement, chartered a bus to take reporters the 115 miles from Little Rock to Hope, set up a filing center, provided for television coverage needs, and more. In other words, this time Huckabee is doing it like a real campaign, with money and everything.
The only question is, will voters like big campaign Huckabee the way they liked campaign-on-a-shoestring Huckabee? The old Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses and seven other states in 2008. Can Huckabee improve on that in 2016? If so, how?
Look for Huckabee to reconnect with his years as governor, from 1996 to 2007. When Huckabee announced his candidacy in January 2007, he had left the governor’s office less than three weeks before. It was all fresh. Now, eight years have passed. In the intervening time, Huckabee has become known at least much as a media personality than as a former governor. As he begins a new campaign against a field of Republican governors — Walker, Jindal, Perry, Christie, Kasich — Huckabee will do a lot of reminding voters that he spent 11 years as a state chief executive.
But Huckabee will argue that he wasn’t just any governor — he was a governor who fought the Clintons every day. Preparing for his announcement, Huckabee’s team sent out an information sheet headlined, “Gov. Mike Huckabee’s Fight Against the Clinton Machine.” It stressed how Huckabee ran Arkansas at a time when the state was controlled by huge Democratic majorities, which were in turn controlled by Bill and Hillary Clinton. “Mr. Huckabee ran against a Democratic machine that pulled out all the stops against him,” the Wall Street Journal reported back in the 1990s.
In the coming campaign, Huckabee will tell voters that he is uniquely qualified to run against Hillary Clinton because he’s been fighting Hillary and Bill Clinton, and their allied forces, for all his political life. And — most importantly — he won.
By recasting Huckabee’s gubernatorial years as a showdown with the Clintons, the idea is to persuade Republican voters to take a new look at a story many of them have heard before. Huckabee has a solid record as governor of Arkansas that could be characterized as a mix of conservative and centrist — not a bad mix for a general election. But there’s nothing about the record that is any different today than it was in January 2007, when Huckabee last announced. What’s different is the context — a fight against the Clinton machine.
Huckabee brings some clear strengths to the race. The biggest is that a lot of voters like him. “Gov. Mike Huckabee is the most well-liked potential Republican candidate for president and has a very high ceiling of support among all Republicans, not just evangelicals, according to recent public polling,” Huckabee adviser Bob Wickers wrote in late April. Wickers cited both national and early-state surveys from Fox News, Gallup, Quinnipiac, and others showing Huckabee’s favorable rating in the high 50s and low 60s. In addition, Wickers pointed to polls showing Huckabee scoring well in the “would consider voting for” category — that is, a lot of Republican voters who do not necessarily support Huckabee still say they would consider voting for him in the future.
Huckabee will also bring a lot more money to the table then he did in 2007. It’s hard to overstate how broke his campaign was back then. In addition to being virtually unknown, Huckabee also had a pretty strong distaste for fundraising. Now, however, he says it is easier, and he’s doing more of it. “Eight years ago, I’d try to talk to a potential donor, and they’d either say, no, who are you, how do you spell your name, let me get back to you — and they never did,” Huckabee said in an interview last September. “Now, people call me and they want to meet with me, talk to me — it’s a very different circumstance.”
So Huckabee has the potential to be a stronger candidate today then he was in 2007. On the other hand, he’ll be competing in an environment in which Republican voters are hungry for something new. They were tired after eight years of George W. Bush, deeply unhappy after eight of Barack Obama, and now they’re looking for a new candidate to lead the GOP to victory. In Huckabee, they see a guy who ran and lost eight years ago and has been on TV ever since. In addition, Huckabee first became governor of Arkansas nearly 20 years ago. That’s a long time. Is he really the new face many voters want?
Huckabee’s defenders have a couple of responses. First, the winners of the 2008 and 2012 Republican nominations were candidates who had run before. Second, the Obama experience has shown voters, at least Republican and independent voters, that new and inexperienced isn’t always good.
“I don’t know that newness is necessarily going to win the day,” says a Republican strategist. “Newness makes you new, but newness doesn’t mean you’ve actually accomplished anything. Newness doesn’t mean you know how to govern. Newness doesn’t mean you know how to navigate a very volatile political environment.”
At the moment, Huckabee is in sixth place in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls of the GOP race — just behind Ted Cruz and in front of Chris Christie. In Iowa, he’s in fourth place in the RCP average. In New Hampshire, he’s in seventh place, and fourth in South Carolina. If the experience of other Republican candidates is any guide, Huckabee will likely enjoy a bump after his announcement.
But the longer term question for Huckabee is whether he can recapture the momentum, and can inspire voters, the way he did for a brief time in 2008. On the eve of the Iowa caucuses in January of that year, I paid a visit to Huckabee’s campaign headquarters in downtown Des Moines. The scene was half political operation and half day-care center. Volunteers had brought their children in as they manned phones for Huckabee. Some had made their own Huckabee campaign material, at their own expense. They were working intently as the kids ran around. That was the kind of intense voter loyalty that won Iowa.
But Huckabee could not take the momentum into New Hampshire and South Carolina and beyond, although he would later win several other states, mostly in the South. Maybe it was because he didn’t have enough money, or maybe it was because he simply could not broaden his appeal beyond social conservatives. Whatever the case, this time, he’ll do things differently. He has to.
