The Hill is reporting that Mike Huckabee might drop his presidential bid to run for Senate against Mark Pryor in 2008. Huckabee has a presidential exploratory committee, but has not formally announced his candidacy for president. Some Republican supporters and bloggers in Arkansas are hoping Huckabee decides not to run for president and takes a crack at Pryor. The state GOP doesn’t have any real prospects for a candidate who can beat Pryor, though the NRSC is claiming to have options beyond Huckabee (they do, they’re just not good ones).
Although those close to Huckabee chalk up the Senate talk to overanxious bloggers and speculation, some see Huckabee-for-Senate as a real possibility and most Republicans make it clear they would welcome him home.
One state GOP source familiar with Huckabee’s campaign said a Senate bid could indeed materialize and that it’s something Huckabee has considered and analyzed. Huckabee ran for Senate in 1992.
Huckabee couldn’t wait too long to abandon the presidential bid, the source said, and the Aug. 11 Republican straw poll in Ames, Iowa, could be a fork in the road.
“If he’s knocked out by the straw poll, then, yes, that’s a credible scenario,” the source said. “If he’s still around, I think, timeline-wise, it would add to the baggage that he already has in the state to drop a presidential [campaign] and come back and run for Senate.”
Huckabee’s presidential campaign said a Senate bid is not in the works and that it’s not something he’s looking at right now. [Emphasis added]
So there’s been private talk of a Senate run, but nothing formal. Announcing that he was considering a Senate run now would effectively kill what little momentum he’s gained in the presidential race so far. Huckabee has a long way to go. He’s a second-tier candidate who could – or perhaps even should – be a top-tier candidate in a primary based around faithfulness to Republican ideology. But as Matt Stoller has pointed out, the Republican presidential primary isn’t based around explicit ideological qualifications. We see this with the strength of the Giuliani, Romney, and McCain campaigns. Giuliani is a social moderate, Romney used to be a social moderate, and McCain, though a staunch conservative, is perceived as a moderate. Lower-tier Republican candidates like Huckabee and Sam Brownback are suffering because of this and will have to work doubly hard to find oxygen in an environment where donor dollars and media air time are being sucked up by the front-runners.
Technorati Tags: John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, 2008 elections, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback
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