page_title: Mike Huckabee 2008 presidential campaign
section_title: Third quarter 2007
hierarchical_section_title: Mike Huckabee 2008 presidential campaign / Campaign development / Third quarter 2007
caption_attribution_description: Mike Huckabee speaking at the second annual Steps to a HealthierUS Summit.
context_page_description: The Mike Huckabee 2008 presidential campaign began on January 28, 2007, when former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President of the United States for the 2008 election. Huckabee ultimately ended his bid for the nomination after losing the Texas Republican primary on March 4, 2008.
  Huckabee's campaign began with a first-quarter fundraising total lower than many of the front-running Republican candidates, raising $544,880. Huckabee said that he found it difficult to move forward in a race "ruled by candidates with the biggest names". Nonetheless, Huckabee placed second in the August 11 Iowa Straw Poll with 18.1 percent. He came in second at the onsite polling of the Family Research Council Values Voters Summit on October 21, 2007, with 28% of the vote, and garnered a celebrity endorsement from actor Chuck Norris.
  In December 2007, Huckabee began challenging other candidates for first place in national polls among Republicans. On January 3, 2008, Huckabee won the Iowa Republican Caucuses with 34% of the electorate. On Super Tuesday, Huckabee won an additional six states, including most of the Deep South.
context_section_description: Early in the third quarter, after second-quarter fundraising totals increased only slightly to over $760,000, Huckabee criticized the top-tier Republicans for wastefully spending their campaign money and said that "I really don't want some folks in charge of the federal treasury if the way they're burning campaign money is indicative of how they would burn taxpayer money"
  Political analyst and former Bill Clinton campaign manager Dick Morris called Huckabee his favorite among the bottom-tier candidates on Hannity and Colmes on July 3. Huckabee began a grassroots movement in Iowa, and stumped throughout the state during July. In a July 9, 2007, interview, Huckabee said that his solution for ending the ongoing violence in Iraq would include a troop increase and seeking additional support from other nations in the Middle East. He was a guest on Fox News' 'The Neal Cavuto Show' on Friday, July 20, and then returned to Iowa for numerous Meet Mike Huckabee events. He traveled to Amarillo, Texas on July 22 to give a sermon at The Church at Quail Creek. Huckabee continued to keep a busy schedule in Iowa in late July; he traveled to Muscatine and was a guest on the conservative radio talk show The Right Balance with host Greg Allen on July 24.
  An Iowa poll conducted on July 26 placed Huckabee far behind front-runners Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, but ahead of second tier candidates Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul, Duncan Hunter, and Tommy Thompson. Huckabee has also agreed to be part of a Cancer Forum in Iowa on August 28, held by cancer survivor Lance Armstrong. In the summer of 2007, Huckabee began to become closely compared to Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, also a Presidential candidate, for their similar socially conservative views. Huckabee and Brownback have been said to be the top candidates among evangelicals and other Christians. Huckabee tried to separate himself from Brownback (and succeeded, as Brownback dropped from the campaign) whom he saw as his main rival at that point. When asked what separates him from Brownback, he said that "the key difference is I've actually been a Governor for ten and a half years and I've run a government." He also said that no senator has been elected since JFK, and "frankly there's a good reason for that." Several polls in the state have placed Huckabee ahead of Brownback; a Mason-Dixon poll placed him at 7% with Brownback at 6. Huckabee acknowledged their similarities and said that "without a doubt, we're going after the same voters." Other sources have expressed concern that there is room for only one of them in the race, and that if Huckabee comes out on top, Brownback will struggle to raise money and vice versa.
  On July 26, Huckabee called upon Tom Tancredo to pull his campaign's campaign ad which attacked Huckabee on the subject of illegal immigration. Huckabee called the ad "blatantly dishonest" and said that "when people engage in a completely false attack, it's usually an act of desperation. To me, it's a badge of honor because he sees that we are reaching the people we are trying to reach." Tancredo's campaign responded by saying that Huckabee supports amnesty for illegal immigrants, and that the ad was correct while Huckabee's campaign insisted that the ad "clearly distorts Mike Huckabee's conservative record on amnesty."
  In early August, after the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Huckabee expressed his sympathy to the victims of the disaster and said that taxes do not need to be raised in order to fix the roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, claiming that the billions of dollars spent on other countries' infrastructure should be spent in the United States. He said that "we have to start addressing building this country, not everybody else's."
  Mike Huckabee appeared on the CBS Evening News on August 1 to discuss the Iowa Straw Poll and his ongoing campaign in Iowa. He was among the Republican debaters in Iowa on August 5, and came in with 8 percent support in a pre-debate poll, tying with John McCain and ahead of his main competitor Sam Bro
caption: Mike Huckabee giving a speech in 2004
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