On your mark, get set, speculate.
Former Arkansas Republican governor and Fox News host Mike Huckabee added to the 2016 talk Thursday, saying he's mulling a presidential bid.
“I’m keeping the door open,” Huckabee told the New York Times. “I think right now the focus needs to be on 2014, but I’m mindful of the fact that there’s a real opportunity for me.”
He added that he would not run, though, without proper financial support. Huckabee’s first and only attempt to secure his party’s nomination failed in 2008, despite a momentous start in which he won the Iowa caucuses. After the campaign ended, Huckabee suggested he would seek higher office again in the future. He decided not to run in 2012.
Huckabee said Thursday after an event in Little Rock, Ark. that he received encouragement from influential evangelical leaders in Iowa and South Carolina who “certaintly want [him] to take another shot at it and they said that. They expressed that.”
In an interview with the Washington Post, Huckabee sounded confident that he would be just fine on the fundraising front.
“With the advent of the super PACs, it frankly is a lot easier to get the financial support. You can find a few people that really, really are capable of helping and want to,” Huckabee said. “One of the challenges I had was, I was out there raising it $2,500 at a time, and there weren’t many people supporting me who could afford the $2,500.”
Since 2008, Huckabee has made his name on the national stage as a pundit and and political analyst for conservative media. Along with his weekly Fox program, Huckabee hosts an afternoon radio show.
“He’s been the most successful failed presidential candidate in the history of our country,” Chip Saltsman, Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, said in a 2009 interview.