Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told Newsmax on Wednesday that if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis runs for president in 2024, he'll have to explain why he "ran for governor just last year."
Huckabee, who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016 after serving as governor from 1996 to 2007, told "John Bachman Now," "One of the challenges that he's going to have to answer is a very obvious question: If you want to be president, how come you ran for governor just last year?"
He added that voters will say to DeSantis, "You asked for a four-year job, and then you barely had gotten into it before you were looking for another four-year job."
The former governor continued, "So that's a challenge, and I think sometimes ... it doesn't matter who's running for office, you need to answer the question: Do you not like the one you have, and why did you ask folks to give it to you if you didn't plan to keep it?"
When asked about DeSantis reportedly choosing to announce his campaign via an interview with Twitter owner Elon Musk, Huckabee said, "In this day of social media [it] could be very effective, because traditional ways of running for office have certainly been blown up by the presence of social media, the immediacy of it."
But he also said that it's "somewhat of a risky strategy on the part of Ron DeSantis ... he'll have an enormous number of eyeballs watching to see not just what he says, but the medium in which he is saying it, so it could be the forerunner of things to come."
Huckabee also noted that "running for president is really not running in 50 states. It's like running for governor in about five or six states to begin with: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, [and] Florida. And, frankly, if you don't win those early states, I don't care how well you're doing in California, or Texas, or Missouri, you're not going to be president. You have to win the early primaries, and that's really what people forget when they say, 'Oh, you know, this person is really going to have a terrific campaign.' Well, let's see. It all depends on how well one does in the early states."
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Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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