Mike Huckabee, perhaps better than any other presidential contender, demonstrates the difficulties Florida presents for White House candidates.
When the former Arkansas governor returns to Sarasota on Saturday, he will be revisiting the site where his presidential aspirations were dashed in 2008 because of Florida’s complexities.
While the candidates spend months in the early, smaller primary states engaging in the retail politics of pancake breakfasts and county fairs, Florida presents distinct problems requiring a vast, developed campaign network and huge sums to advertise on the air.
“It’s a state where you just can’t succeed doing that same retail politicking,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist who worked on the 2008 John McCain presidential campaign.
Mike Huckabee at a book signing ceremony on Lido Key in December 2010. He returns to Sarasota on Saturday. (Craig Litten /Herald-Tribune Media Group)
In other words, the folksy charm and sense of humor Huckabee flashed in Iowa and New Hampshire never had an avenue in Florida.
When Huckabee touched down in Sarasota just five days before the 2008 primary, he had no real campaign team on the ground, no TV ads in the entire state and only one big campaign endorsement from a Florida player: then-Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, who praised Huckabee for his sincerity but had little statewide pull at the time.
The result? Huckabee’s campaign slid so badly, national radio talk show hosts reported he was dropping out of the race when he wasn’t. He tried to counteract the reports, but on Election Day it contributed to his finish at a distant fourth in Florida, all but ending any hopes he had of winning the White House.
“Well, one of the things that hurt us seriously in Florida was there were a lot of the national talk shows that went out and said we had pulled out of Florida,” Huckabee said in a 2010 interview about what went wrong in 2008. “I was in Florida at the moment it was being said. I was so frustrated.”
In many ways it was similar to the problem that confronted 2012 presidential candidate Rick Santorum. The former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania won in Iowa early and appeared on the cusp of a breakthrough, if he could put together a big win in Florida.
Instead, like Huckabee, he couldn’t win even 14 percent of the vote with a shoestring budget and team of inexperienced staffers in the state. He finished a distant third, and Mitt Romney left Florida with a lead that Santorum could never challenge.
Veteran Florida political consultant Jamie Miller said that at minimum, a primary challenger needs 15 to 20 professional staffers and more than $5 million to compete in this state’s critical election, expected to be in early March in 2016.
The ’08 and ’12 campaigns serve as a reminder that momentum coming out of Iowa and New Hampshire can be overstated because of Florida’s challenges to upstarts, said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
Sabato said 2016 will only be harder because of the expected presence of Jeb Bush and Rubio.
With both Floridians considering the race, it could become incredibly tough for other candidates to find operatives and donors in the Sunshine State who aren’t loyal to one or the other.
Still, the uncertainty surrounding both Bush and Rubio has other candidates hitting Florida to test the political climate. When Huckabee reaches Sarasota he will be the latest in a string of GOP presidential hopefuls seeking to build their status with local Republicans and make inroads with Florida’s vast GOP donor base.
Last year, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, former Rep. Allen West, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal made stumplike speeches in Sarasota and mixed with some of the region’s most influential donors.
Next month, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is scheduled to hold a rally at Dolphin Aviation with party activists; Sarasota Republican Party chairman Joe Gruters said he expects more White House contenders to follow.
Huckabee’s Sarasota trip is considerably less formal. He is here to sign copies of his new book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” starting at 6 p.m. at Bookstore1 at 1359 Main St., in Sarasota.
Huckabee has made some of the most serious maneuvers in preparation for 2016, though he has yet to officially announce. Earlier this month, he announced he was quitting his Fox News program to actively explore running again.
“The honorable thing to do at this point is to end my tenure here at Fox, so I can openly talk with potential donors and supporters and gauge support,” he said on Facebook on Jan. 4.
Public polling shows Huckabee already leads the rest of a potential field in Iowa if he gets in the race.
