Hello – from the campaign trail.
It's not Adele ... it's Mike Huckabee. With just five days to go until the Iowa caucuses, a new music video parody of Adele’s hit song “Hello” invites voters on a ride across the Hawkeye State with the Republican presidential candidate.
“This crazy circus, it’s gone cuckoo-ca-choo / And Huckabee is the guy who’s long overdue,” croons a female voice over imagery of Sen. Ted Cruz campaigning with former Fox News host Glenn Beck.
In the unconventional campaign ad, Huckabee takes on Cruz on multiple occasions, twice seemingly questioning the Texas senator's eligibility to run for president because Cruz was born in Canada. In a fictional text exchange between the two, Cruz types: “I’m Canadian!”
Huckabee won the Iowa caucus when he ran for the White House back in 2008, but fast-forward to 2016 and the most recent NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking Poll shows him pulling just 1 percent support nationally. The crucial evangelical vote carried the Baptist minister to a win in 2008, as it did in 2000 for George W. Bush.
RELATED: Hear the version of "Hello" everyone is talking about!
This time around, however, Huckabee has failed to make a dent with that same voter base. Back in September, he seemed to have a potential lock as he appeared alongside Kim Davis at a widely televised rally supporting her decision to not issue same-sex marriage licenses in Rowan County, Kentucky. Walking a step behind was Cruz, who was infamously blocked from accessing the stage by Huckabee staffers. Video of that moment is included in “Hello, HUCK.”
It turns out that getting "boxed out" of that Kim Davis media stunt didn’t hamper Cruz’s ability to court evangelical voters, and he’s now emerged as the chief foil to more secular front-runner Donald Trump in polls out of Iowa. Cruz is the only GOP rival Huckabee takes on by name in his new music video, hammering home who he seems to view as his biggest competition in Iowa. After the Kim Davis footage plays, the lyrics chime in: “He’s honest.”
But pointing out that “campaigning is a dread” in the cold, and calling Iowans “stubborn and picky” in the same video may not be the best tactic to woo converts from the house of Cruz.