Michael Dale "Mike" Huckabee (24 August 1955-) was Governor of Arkansas from 15 July 1996 to 8 January 2007, succeeding Jim Guy Tucker and preceding Mike Beebe.
Biography[]
Michael Dale Huckabee was born on 24 August 1955 in Hope, Arkansas, United States to a family of Protestant English-Americans that came to America during the colonial era. In 1972, his American Legion chapter named him "Governor of Arkansas", and he was involved in his high school's student leadership. Huckabee graduated from Ouachita Baptist University and gained a bachelor's degree in religion, but he dropped out of a seminary after one year to become a religious broadcaster, a job which led to his election as President of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention in 1989-1991. In 1993, he was only the second US Republican Party politician to be elected Lieutenant-Governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction after Maurice Brit (from 1967-1971). He served under Democratic governor Jim Guy Tucker, but the two were on opposite sides of many issues, and in 1996 he was fortunate when Tucker was arrested for embezzling $3 million, allowing for Huckabee to become the new Governor of Arkansas. During Huckabee's tenure as governor, he gave more pardons to prisoners than any other governors, but 92% of all clemency requests were denied and the size of prisons and the amount of executions increased under him. He served as governor for ten and a half years, and in January 2007 he left office as Mike Beebe took office.
In 2007, Huckabee ran in the Republican primaries during the presidential elections, but he left the race with the support of 248 pledged delegates after it became clear that he would lose the Texas elections to John McCain, who had the support of 1,191 delegates. He was considered to be a possible Vice-President for McCain, but he was not chosen; he also decided not to run for the 2012 elections. However, in 2016 Huckabee announced that he would run for the GOP nomination, and he argued against babies being "taken apart like parts from a Buick" in his anti-abortion views. Huckabee appeared in the GOP debates, but he was not a major candidate, with Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio being the top choices. On 1 February 2016, he decided to suspend his campaign after getting only 1.8% of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, with Ted Cruz winning the round. His daughter Sarah Huckabee Sanders would become Trump's Deputy White House Press Secretary and later Governor.