GOP candidate Mike Huckabee is planning a tour of Iowa that has him making 150 stops in fewer than 30 days and said Monday that the effort is important to attracting the state's numerous undecided voters to his side.
"We have to be near the top," the former Arkansas governor told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "If we're fifth of sixth place in Iowa with the investment that we're making here, then we clearly don't have a good path forward."
Huckabee stressed that the 150 events will not be "drive-bys," but will be actual events that are not just "driving through a county and waving."
"There's no grass growing under our feet," he said. "But then again, with all the snow on the ground, nothing's growing under our feet right now. It's a busy month but we're going to hit all 99 counties, having done events, by Thursday of this week and that's since the middle of May. That's how you win Iowa."
Many people underestimate what happens in Iowa's caucuses, said Huckabee, and they make the mistake of looking at polls, which are often based on a few hundred samples. But according to surveys his own campaign has done, "75 percent of the people here haven't made up their minds."
But there have been surprises in the Iowa caucus, including in 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama soundly defeated Hillary Clinton, who was expected to win, said Huckabee, who won the GOP nod that year.
"I think it's going to be a huge turnout because there's so many candidates and so much energy here," said Huckabee. "The events are drawing a lot of people. I still hold the record for the most votes ever received in an Iowa caucus back in 2008.
"I got just over 40,000 votes. I think the universe of votes is going to be somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 people taking out for the caucuses. It depends how many candidates are in play. I think it will be fewer than a lot of people think."
There are many candidates running ads in Iowa, he continued, but they don't have much of a ground game.
"Iowa people don't want to you fly over in an airplane, wave at them, give them 30 pounds of mail every day in their mailbox," said Huckabee.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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