Huckabee would give a speech to a crowd of 250 supporters at a jet hangar. “I want to get something out of the way because there are some pretty crazy rumors going around that the Huckabee campaign is pulling out of Florida,” he addressed.
He then followed up by saying: “Well, it doesn’t look like it to me! And we’re not!”
So far, Florida is a very expensive state to campaign in. Huckabee has never had a lot of funding for his campaigning. The major news outlets reported that Huckabee is out of play in Florida while he had never actually said it.
Huckabee’s campaign has said that there are more events planned following tomorrow night’s Republican debate. He told reporters that he thought the journalists were drawing up a false conclusion after the campaign would no longer make arrangements for traveling journalists.
In response, Huckabee had called it impractical to have a press bus because of the sheer size of Florida along with too many empty seats on the press plane.
“Those news reports that our demise is imminent is much exaggerated,” he said.
There has been some speculation that Huckabee lost in South Carolina due to spending so much time in Michigan. Those same think that Huckabee is committing campaign suicide on Super Tuesday by spending so much time in Florida.
Huckabee thinks differently. He disagreed about losing South Carolina due to spending time in Michigan.
“Elections are all pieces of a much larger puzzle,” Huckabee said. He added: “I think a big thing people have to remember is that, unlike any election, this is going to come down to delegate count.”
For this reason, Huckabee’s campaign strategy could be puzzling.
Since being in Florida, Huckabee has held closed press events. That could pose two scenarios that: either nothing is going on and the campaign does not want the press to report about it or that something is happening and they do not want the national press to know about it.
Huckabee was challenged again on how he plans to win Florida. He answered: “If money were the reason that people got all the votes, we never would have won Iowa. We wouldn’t have placed well in New Hampshire and Michigan…We almost won South Carolina. We’ve been in contention in every state.”
He then continued with: “We’re doing a lot of things with grassroots organizations that aren’t necessarily public events on the public calendar but there’s an enormous amount of activity going on behind the scenes and underground that will show up on Tuesday.”
Huckabee also took the chance to attack his opponents.
In attacking Mitt Romney, Huckabee said: “If one looks at [Romney’s] business career, it is largely dealing with a capital company that took companies, often broke them apart, people lost jobs, didn’t gain jobs. A lot of the money that was made within those companies ended up offshore. I’m not sure that that helps the American economy when you take people’s money and you put it in Cayman Island bank accounts…If that’s how we recover the America’s economy, I’m not sure how many Americans benefit out of that.”
Huckabee also attacked John McCain. He would say: “If you’re extremely wealthy, you can write checks of tens of millions of dollars to your campaign and be credible – not because your ideas or resonating with people but because your checkbook is taken seriously at radio and television stations…But the fact is if you’re a campaign like ours, you’re limited to people who can only give you up to $2,300 per person.”