Mike Huckabee suspends his 2016 campaign

Mike Huckabee suspended his bid for the Republican nomination, ending a second run that overshadowed by other candidates in the former Arkansas governor’s social-conservative lane.

Huckabee’s announcement concludes a campaign that was not nearly as prominent as his previous run at the Republican nomination in 2008, where he won eight states, including the Iowa caucus.


In 2016, Huckabee struggled to consistently stay on the main stage in Republican presidential debates, never raised more than $15 million at one time, and failed to rally the same evangelical support he won in his last presidential run. One of the most conspicuous blows to his campaign came when Bob Vander Plaats endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz, denying Huckabee a critical ally in the contest to win over Iowa’s evangelicals.

Internally, Huckabee’s team suffered staffing bumps. In December 2015 Alice Stewart, Huckabee’s communications director, departed due to divergent visions with other staffers on the direction of the campaign and the press shop. Stewart, like Vander Plaats, joined up with Cruz.

Near the end of Huckabee’s campaign, amid lackluster polling nationally (he never averaged at 10 percent nationally) and in all of the early primary states, he opted to throw all of his chips in in Iowa, cutting the salaries of senior staff and directing most of the campaign’s team and resources to a last ditch push there. Huckabee and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former governor’s daughter and campaign manager, said that if he didn’t perform well there the campaign was unlikely to continue.