http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/mike-huckabee-iowa-114550.html?hp=m1#.VMVE3S6GNOUDoes Iowa Still Heart Huckabee?
The former Arkansas governor is hinting at another run. But 2016 is not 2008.
By DAVE PRICE
January 24, 2015
Before Mike Huckabee ran in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, Lori Jungling, a mother of four in Altoona, about 15 minutes outside Des Moines, had never been involved in a presidential campaign. Actually, Jungling had never even bothered to vote. But in 2007, the message from the Baptist minister-turned-Republican Arkansas governor made its way to Jungling’s personal faith-first foundation, and soon enough she was volunteering—a lot. Calls, emails, tweets, events. She even served as state director for Huck PAC, Huckabee’s 2008 grassroots political action committee. She didn’t take one dime. “He believes what I believe,” she told me.
That’s the kind of passion Huckabee created in thousands of other Lori Junglings in Iowa seven years ago. He was a unique force that campaign cycle, galvanizing evangelicals and home-schoolers in a way no one in this state can remember happening before. And he not only shocked the establishment by thumping the second-place finisher, Mitt Romney, by 9 percentage points on his way to victory, but he also created a fervor with his supporters that pushed the presidential caucus turnout to levels not seen before. Approximately 125,000 Republicans caucused in 2008, almost 50 percent more than had ever showed up. More than 60 percent of the Republicans caucus-goers that year were also evangelicals. The Baptist minister was doing some serious preaching. And Iowans sang his praise.
They sang a different tune in 2012, though. When Huckabee decided not to run again for president, many other candidates—Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich—all tried to channel his 2008 campaign message. In the end, Santorum did the best job of pulling together Huckabee’s faction of social conservatives, and was named the 2012 GOP caucus champion. Call it the Huckabee model for modern-day campaigning in Iowa. Huckabee mastered it. Others copied it. Now, however, Huckabee himself may be competing against it.
That’s because Huckabee is giving some serious hints that he will run again. He quit his Fox News television show earlier this month “to ascertain if the support exists strongly enough for another Presidential run.” And while he might be a long-shot candidate nationwide, if he does decide to jump into the race, he would come into Iowa as the man to beat.
But 2016 is not 2008, or even 2012. Which raises the question: How would their beloved Huck fare eight years later?
“Way too early to say that,” Republican Gov. Terry Branstad tells me. He won’t say anyone is the man, or woman, to beat because of the depth of the potential field this time around. His Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds, who happened to be standing next to Branstad when I spoke to the governor recently, nodded in agreement, and after reflecting on all the early names of potential candidates, said simply, “Here we go!”
Indeed, a lot has changed in the past eight years—in Iowa and American politics writ large. For one, there is no sitting incumbent as there was in 2012, when Huckabee sat out. And while Huckabee might have cornered the evangelical vote in 2008, many of his potential competitors in 2016—former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker—would all likely go after the same bloc. Not to mention Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who both could make another campaign that makes it to Iowa again.
Another change: The anti-establishment movement on the right has grown more crowded and more segmented recently. There isn’t just the moderates/economy-first portion of the GOP and the newly more organized social conservatives (more organized thanks, in large part, to Huckabee’s efforts). There’s now also the libertarian/Tea Party/constitutionalist crowd. Add Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul to that group, plus Cruz and likely Carson, too. There are a lot of choices for those who don’t think moderates like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Mitt Romney are the way to go. A lot of choices besides Huckabee.
Already, the sons of Huck—his potential competition—have descended on Iowa and are making their mark. In December, pro-Carson forces opened the state’s first campaign-like office. Officially it belongs to the Draft Ben Carson movement, but two full-timers and three part-timers make sure Iowans know who Carson is. And Ryan Rhodes, a former Michele Bachmann staffer, is putting together what looks like it will become the official campaign side of Carson’s Iowa operations.
Other potential campaigns might not be quite as established, but they are also beginning to connect with the state. Jindal has hosted Iowans, including the state’s Republican National Committeewoman, Tamara Scott, back in his state and has spent time this month back in Iowa meeting with influential religious leaders. Texas Gov. Perry has made similar moves. And former Pennsylvania Sen. Santorum is in the state more than some of Iowa’s snowbirds; he has already spent a dozen days traveling the state since the last general election, second only to Perry’s 15. Ted Cruz is also working Iowa hard, having traveled the state for eight days over that same time, including headlining the party’s Ronald Reagan Dinner in Des Moines before more than 600 diehards.
And that’s all before this weekend, which marks the unofficial beginning of the 2016 Iowa Caucus campaign. Rep. Steve King’s much-anticipated Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday and Sunday is offering a “who’s-who” of Republicans who like to be considered presidential candidates: Santorum, Cruz, Perry, Walker, New Jersey Gov. Christie, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Oh, and Mike Huckabee.
That’s a whole army of challengers compared to what Huckabee faced in 2008. Sam Brownback, then a U.S. senator from Kansas, tried for a while to win over the state’s social conservatives but dropped out after bombing in the Iowa Republican Party’s August 2007 straw poll. Mitt Romney, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, while more formidable as general election candidates, weren’t exactly the darlings of the social right when they competed. So that left the majority of the increasingly organized born-againers and home-schoolers for Huckabee, and helped him surprise most everyone with his caucus night win, with 34 percent of the vote.
How, now, does Huckabee wow them again when Iowans know he’s coming? That’s what makes this time around so much harder for him. “If Mike Huckabee decides to run for president, he’ll be the instant frontrunner in Iowa,” insists Tim Albrecht, who has worked on Iowa presidential campaigns of Steve Forbes and Mitt Romney but isn’t signed onto a 2016 campaign yet (though, most everyone expects him to hook on with a top-notch contender).
“Having won the caucuses before, people will expect him to come to Iowa often,” Albrecht adds—and, he maintains, to win.
That’s a blessing and a curse. Some, like Albrecht, figure that since Huckabee has won the caucuses before, he has to win again in 2016 to satisfy the “expectations game.” Others say, why not make the same argument about Santorum, who is also a caucus winner from 2012? And how can you leave out Romney, who has placed second in two straight caucuses and was the party’s nominee in 2012? And while Jeb Bush hasn’t been a caucus contender, both his brother and father have. As Branstad pointed out to me, Jeb toured Iowa with his brothers, helping his father’s 1980 winning caucus campaign, which stunned Ronald Reagan’s followers, who had assumed victory. “You know how to do this,” Branstad says he recently told Bush.
There’s also the question of whether Huckabee’s political record in 2008 holds up today, now that his party has shifted rightward. In 2008—before the rise of the Tea Party, remember—a senator named Barack Obama won the Democratic caucus in Iowa with a message that Bob Vander Plaats, who served as Huckabee’s state chairman that year, describes as, “We were all going to sing kumbaya.” But after six years of hyperpartisanship and gridlock in Washington, “People want someone who will uproot the system,” says Vander Plaats, CEO of The Family Leader, a social conservative political group in Iowa.
Take the Common Core, the federal education guidelines to improve student performance implemented under President Obama—guidelines that conservatives, particularly home-schoolers and school-choice backers, detest. Common Core wasn’t yet an issue when Huckabee was governor or when he was running for president, but he once praised them as a talk show host. In 2013, Huckabee also wrote in a letter to Oklahoma legislators wary of the Common Core standards saying the guidelines were “near and dear to my heart” and that any conservative criticism of them was “short-sighted.”
Huckabee has taken a tougher stance against the Core more recently, saying he opposes what they have become—a federal intrusion into the lives of parents, students and local school administrators. But that’s still not nearly enough for Shane Vander Hart, for instance, a longtime activist, former pastor and founder of the popular social conservative network of blogs Caffeinated Thoughts. Vander Hart, by the way, backed Huckabee in 2008. But he believes that Cruz, Santorum and Jindal are far more vocally opposed to the standards; while that doesn’t disqualify Huckabee, it is something that separates those competitors in a potentially very conservative caucus field. “They’re similar on life, similar on Second Amendment,” Vander Hart says. “We’re looking at wedge issues to separate them.”
Danny Carroll, a former legislator and state party chairman who served as Huckabee’s state co-chairman in 2008, adds that Iowans in social conservative circles might want a little more fire this time around, compared to what Huckabee gave them in 2008 with his folksy stories and neighborly demeanor. “Huckabee is still well-loved and respected. And many conservative Iowans would be tickled if he were the nominee,” Carroll says. But he also knows that some in the social right have hardened their positions since Huckabee’s hey-day. They don’t like it that Huckabee raised taxes as governor, even if it was to help Arkansas’s roads that crumbled under the motorists who used them, and even though Huckabee cut far more taxes than he raised. And some don’t like it that Huckabee compromised with Democratic lawmakers, even though his party lacked the numbers to push through changes without them. For 2016 Huckabee believers, Carroll offers this warning: “More people are reacting to the last several years [since Obama entered the White House], and they’re looking for a true conservative champion.”
Already, Huckabee is showing signs he understands that. Back in 2008, Huckabee went around Iowa—literally running sometimes—talking about how marathons and better eating had helped him lose 100 pounds. His book, Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork, shared his new lifestyle. But now that First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign has become a target for conservatives, Huckabee, coincidentally or not, isn’t running marathons any more. And his new book out later this month—God, Guns, Grits and Gravy—definitely comes from a different menu. It rips on music superstar Beyoncé for her sexually suggestive lyrics and the Obamas for letting their daughters listen to them. Huckabee 2016 may be a feistier version of the one Iowans met eight years previously.
We’ll get a first look at the new Huck when he visits Cedar Rapids and Des Moines this weekend for his book tour and the Iowa Freedom Summit, which is taking place before more than 1,200 people packed in activists at Des Moines’s historic Hoyt Sherman Theater.
Huckabee knows the site well. He stood on the same stage one month before the 2012 caucuses, not as a candidate but as the host, an emcee of sorts, for those competing in the race. Santorum shined that night, his heartfelt words on faith, family and freedom helping him to become the Huckabee of the time. Huckabee only watched then. But now, he’ll be back on center stage—to try to show the best of the 2008 candidate Iowans remember, along with the rest of the candidate they now want him to be.
