LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas—Mike Huckabee was not a millionaire when he ran for president in 2008, and liked to let people know it during his underdog campaign against wealthy rivals like John McCain and Mitt Romney.

“I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night,” he quipped.

Now, after hosting his own Fox News show and a syndicated radio program, while authoring several books, the former governor is solidly – and, some would say, ostentatiously — a part of the one percent.

There’s the 10,900-square-foot beachfront mansion he built on Florida’s Panhandle, worth more than $3 million. There are regular trips on private jets, often to elite events at which he has given countless paid speeches.

On Tuesday, as he formally kicked off his second campaign for the presidency, Huckabee knows he must reassure his former supporters that he has not changed even as his pockets grew much, much deeper. His announcement, in the small town of Hope where he grew up poor, reflects a broader effort by his campaign to show that he’s still folksy and down-to-earth.

“I think I’m the same person that I was,” the 59-year-old told POLITICO during an interview ahead of his announcement. “I haven’t, to my knowledge, changed a single belief or conviction. I believe everything I believed in 2008.”

Last time, he won the Iowa caucuses and carried seven other states with a populist message that the little guy was getting trampled by the special interests.

“Where my strength really came from was blue-collar working class people,” Huckabee recalled. “They didn’t have money but they had energy. They felt like no one else was there to speak for them or even knew who they were. I think they believed, and I think they still believe, that not only have I come from them – that’s who I am – but that I’ve never lost touch with what it’s like to be out there working harder and getting nowhere.”

More than anyone else in the 2016 field, including Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the former Southern Baptist minister decries the influence of “corporatists” and “globalists” over the GOP. Still, hints of his fabulous new life bleed into his rhetoric. He raised eyebrows during a speech in New Hampshire two weeks ago, for instance, when he recalled a recent conversation with a Russian limo driver.

“A couple of weeks ago I was in Los Angeles, and I was going to be on The Bill Maher Show,” he told hundreds of activists at the climax of a half-hour speech. “The driver comes and picks me up at the hotel and is taking me to the studio.”

In short, the driver fled the Soviet Union in 1988 with his infant daughter and they’re now living the American Dream: the dad owns the car service company, and his daughter became a nurse. “I said, ‘Dmitri, you make more sense and talk better than 90 percent of the people we’ve elected to Congress,’” Huckabee told the crowd. “He said, ‘Well I don’t think I’ll ever have that platform.’ I told him, ‘Dmitri, you may not. Maybe you don’t want it. But I hope I can tell your story!’”

Huckabee still tells his own up-from-the-bootstraps story, but it’s not quite the same as in 2008 – when he’d only been out of the governorship for a year and had a small bank account.

During that campaign, in the days before the crucial Wisconsin primary, Huckabee was so strapped for cash that he went off the trail to deliver a paid speech in the Cayman Islands. “You’ve got to work for a living and pay your bills,” he said at the time. He attacked Romney that year for looking like “the guy who laid you off.” He held events at Pizza Ranches because it was free to rent space at the chain restaurant.

In the years since, Huckabee has aggressively filled his coffers.

A POLITICO report last July highlighted his penchant for using private jets. He’s racked up more than a quarter-million dollars in private air travel bills over the past few years and has routinely insisted that candidates or local parties that he’s coming to support pay the expense.

The New York Times recently spotlighted dubious groups Huckabee has rented his campaign email list out to – from survivalists warning of coming food shortages to a group that says there’s a miracle cure for cancer hidden in the Bible (which people can find out about with a $72 subscription to their product). Huckabee recorded an infomercial for a sketchy diabetes treatment that scientists say is bunk.

Mike Huckabee’s

2016 power players Members of Mike Huckabee’s core team generally already know one another: Several are alumni of his last presidential bid. More staffers are expected to be rolled out in coming days, but in the meantime, here’s a look at Huckabee’s power map. Click here to read a fuller list with details. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, campaign manager Chip Saltsman, senior adviser Arkansas Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin, senior political adviser Alice Stewart (pictured) and Hogan Gidley, involved in communications Bob Wickers, pollster and media consultant Jim Terry, national political director Image credits: AP/Getty

He enters the 2016 race with high expectations. Because he won Iowa last time, many pundits say the caucuses will be do-or-die for him this time. Not surprisingly, his first appearances after the Arkansas announcement are there.

“A second or third place finish does not move him forward,” said Ed Rollins, the national chairman of Huckabee’s 2008 campaign, who has not endorsed him for 2016.

A broader — and probably more important — question is whether a retread can stand out in a crowded field with fresher faces. Even his rollout has been partly overshadowed by dark horse upstarts like former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, both of whom announced on Monday.

Leading social conservatives in Iowa say that Huckabee retains a big reservoir of goodwill, but that he cannot count on retaining his supporters from 2008. Many broke for Rick Santorum in 2012, who will run again. And this time, candidates like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker have already been making an aggressive play for his base of support. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is traveling the early states making the case that the party needs to nominate a young, fresh face to contrast with Hillary Clinton. Huckabee notes that he was battling the Clintons for decades in Arkansas before anyone else even heard of them.

Huckabee has acknowledged he probably needs to win Iowa again and should perform stronger in New Hampshire than last time. South Carolina, the first state in the South with a primary, could give him a boost if he gets momentum and enough money from the first contests.

That makes March 1 central to his strategy. A handful of Southern states Huckabee won in 2008, including Arkansas, have coordinated to schedule an “SEC primary” that day.

Ironically, though he’s now rich himself, it’s an open question whether Huckabee will be able to raise enough money to stay in the race through the SEC primary and beyond. He’ll get a lot of small-dollar gifts, but he has yet to demonstrate the ability to put together a high-dollar finance operation. “That’s not been solved, to the best of my knowledge,” said Rollins.

Iowa GOP operative Nick Ryan, who ran the pro-Rick Santorum super PAC in 2012, will run the pro-Huckabee super PAC this time. A handful of big donors from the evangelical community could sustain the governor if they chose to do so in this post-Citizens United world, another change since he ran last time.

One thing money cannot easily buy is the name recognition that Huckabee already has from his first run. He undeniably enters the race as a well-defined figure, and especially in the case of Iowa Republicans, remains well-liked, according to polls.

Huckabee says he has not changed, but he knows campaigns have. He recognizes that he’s likely to be outspent but seems to have satisfied himself that he can raise enough money to be viable. He made clear that his campaign will more aggressively push back on attacks using social media and other platforms.

“People asked me how to spell my name eight years ago,” Huckabee said. “They didn’t know what state I had been governor of or for how long. I’ve had a rather significant national platform … It’s not like I’ve been in hibernation for eight years. I’ve been more visible than when I was a candidate or an office holder.”

Huckabee has mellowed a bit. His fifth grandchild is on the way. He says he learned a lot of lessons from the last campaign about “pace and rhythm” to inform how he’d approach another one.

“You learn not to be overly alarmed at a single poll at any particular point, particularly early,” he said. “You learn not to be overly excitable about the flow of things because it changes so often and rapidly.”

Huckabee’s inner circle is packed with loyalists from his 2008 campaign. His daughter, GOP operative Sarah Huckabee Sanders, will manage the 2016 campaign.

The governor stressed that he doesn’t want to hire anyone just because they want to work on a presidential campaign. He needs them to believe in the cause.

“You can’t win like that,” he said. “You’re better to have a very loyal group of people that are really with you that may be smaller in number than it is to have a huge crowd of people that you’re paying but who would leave you tomorrow if somebody came along.”

If Huckabee gets traction, his record will get scrutinized. While still well-regarded by Republicans in Arkansas, there are elements that could be used to sow doubts on the right. Two years ago, he reportedly said the Common Core standards were “near and dear to my heart.” Now he decries them. In 2000, Huckabee commuted the sentence of Maurice Clemmons, who was serving time for burglary charges. In 2009, the convict killed four police officers in Washington State.

There are also thousands of hours of recordings from his Fox News show and radio show for opposition researchers, including those in the GOP, to scour. He was perhaps the most prominent national Republican figure to rally to Todd Akin’s defense in 2012 after the national party abandoned him over his comments about “legitimate rape.”

“He’s said a lot that hasn’t been scrutinized,” said Rollins, his former adviser.

One of the things often missing in stories about Huckabee is how central the economic populism is to his message. He’s best known for provocative comments on gay marriage, abortion and social issues. But he’s trying to broaden his base of support beyond born-again evangelicals.

“The narrative that I was almost like a monolithic candidate for the evangelicals was never the accurate reality,” he said in the interview. “If I had been, I probably would have been the nominee” in 2008.

Huckabee is critical of “trickle-down economics,” as he calls it, using the parlance of the left. His willingness to raise taxes as governor has made him an enemy of the Club for Growth and other conservative groups. He is also against fast track and wants more safeguards in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

For his part, Huckabee points out that he presciently warned about how fundamentally unsound the economy was throughout the 2008 primaries. “The Wall Street Journal ripped me a new one after the September 2007, Dearborn, Michigan, debate,” he said. “A year later, I was absolutely vindicated in what I said.”