Sarah Huckabee Sanders' Appeal Isn’t Just About Trump
For many Americans, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is best known as Trump’s former press secretary, becoming the voice of what was an unusually mendacious administration. But she was already well known to many Arkansans.
Sanders’s father, Mike Huckabee, became the state’s lieutenant governor in 1993, when she was only 10. Arkansas elects its governors and lieutenant governors on separate tickets, and Huckabee first won in a special election in 1993, after his predecessor, Democrat Jim Guy Tucker, rose to the top spot to fill the vacancy left by the newly elected president, Bill Clinton. And after Tucker was convicted of fraud in the Whitewater scandal and resigned in 1996, Huckabee served as governor — elected twice in his own right — until 2007. His popularity was unusual for a Republican in the state at the time, which was still mostly Democratic. Huckabee then went on to run for the Republican presidential nomination unsuccessfully in both 2008 and 2016.
Huckabee Sanders has also pursued a career in Arkansas politics, becoming active in Republican politics throughout the state even before finishing college. She worked on her father’s gubernatorial re-election campaign and then his 2008 presidential campaign and has also worked for Arkansas Sens. Tom Cotton and John Boozman.
A February Talk Business & Politics-Hendrix College poll found Huckabee Sanders 10 points ahead against a generic Democrat. Because Trump remained popular in Arkansas throughout his Presidency, it’s easy to cite as the reason Huckabee Sanders is popular. But that ignores the weight of the Huckabee name in Arkansas. Her dad, who was a Fox News host until 2015, remains popular in the state, too. And in a state where politics is often a family business, Huckabee Sanders’s trajectory is just not that unusual.