WASHINGTON — The new White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was nine years old when she worked her first political campaign: her father’s bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Arkansas.

Republican Mike Huckabee would lose that race to Democratic incumbent Dale Bumpers in 1992. But he’d eventually ascend to the governor’s mansion in Little Rock and run for president twice – all with his daughter right behind.

“When most kids were doing summer camp, I was doing the Arkansas festival circuit, passing out push cards, and shaking hands and tagging along with my dad to every nook and cranny in the state of Arkansas,” she recalled during an April interview on C-SPAN. “I got bit by the bug early.”

That bug bite led to a series of political assignments: in the George W. Bush administration, helping home-state Senators John Boozman and Tom Cotton win their races, and working on the presidential campaigns of her father (twice), George W. Bush and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

After her father abandoned his presidential bid, Sanders joined the Trump campaign last year.

She served as the president’s deputy press secretary until she was named to replace White House press secretary Sean Spicer Friday.

Sanders is said to be a favorite of Trump’s. While pundits sensed the president wasn’t always happy with Spicer’s performance, he seems pleased with Sanders’ unapologetic defense of his policies and actions.

“As deputy press secretary, Sarah has done an outstanding job getting my Administration’s message out to the American people,” Trump said in a White House statement announcing Sanders’ appointment Friday.

Sanders' increasing appearances at the daily White House press briefings, especially during tough moments such as the week of FBI Director James Comey's firing, suggested she was being groomed for Spicer's job.

"Probably the biggest difference between Sanders and Spicer comes down to style not substance," said Callum Borchers, who writes "The Fix" column for The Washington Post. "They both deflect questions, neither one is always shooting straight but Sanders seems to be better than Spicer at keeping her cool, maintaining composure and at least giving an answer and not seeming quite so flustered."

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Many conservatives love her take-no-prisoners style as well.

In May, Rush Limbaugh praised her for the way she defended during a White House press briefing Trump’s decision to fire Comey.

“She is no nonsense. She is confident. She’s unflappable,” Limbaugh said on his radio program. “These people are not in any way, shape, manner, or form rattling her at all.”

Some in the White House press corps have a different opinion.

In June, she had an on-camera dust-up last month with Charlie Spiering, correspondent with the conservative Breitbart News, after she lambasted the media for ongoing reports about the “Russia-Trump hoax.”

Specifically, she referenced CNN’s retraction of a story that said Trump ally and hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci was linked to a Russian investment fund the Senate was investigating as part of its probe into Russia meddling of the U.S. election.”

“Does the president actually expect us not to report on stories of a foreign country trying to influence the presidential election?” Spiering asked.

Scaramucci was named Friday as White House communications director, effectively Sanders’ new boss.

Sanders has been known for some notable statements, including:

"Frankly, George, I think if the president walked across the Potomac, the media would report that he can't swim," she told Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos in March. In April, she told a C-SPAN interviewer that while she disagreed with much of Barack Obama's agenda, she gave him kudos for his parenting skills. "In this day and age, to have somebody who makes his children and his wife a focal point (and) a priority of his life is something we should recognize and comment him for doing," she said At a June 27 White House press briefing, she blasted the media after CNN retracted the Scaramucci story: “I think that we have gone to a place where if the media can’t be trusted to report the news, then that’s a dangerous place for America."

Sanders, 34, is the youngest of Gov. Huckabee’s three children and his only daughter. It was while working on her father’s Iowa campaign in 2007 that she met her future husband, Bryan, a strategist and pollster working for GOP rival Sam Brownback of Kansas.

They have three young children: Scarlett, Huck and George.

Despite her partisan leanings, she counts Mack McLarty, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, as a friend and has publicly commended Obama for being a caring parent.

Sanders said she’s grateful she had a father who introduced her to politics.

“I was a political junkie from an early age, I got a front row seat on something I love to do,” she told C-SPAN in April. “And something I love to be part of, even better than that I had a chance to do something I love and do that with my dad. It helped prepare me for the life I’m living right now.”