WASHINGTON -- In 2008, as presidential candidate Mike Huckabee plodded through the ice and snow of Iowa and New Hampshire, his national campaign manager, Ed Rollins, marched with him, helping the Republican eventually carry eight states while collecting more than 4 million votes nationwide.
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Eight years later, Rollins is spending his work time in a warm TV studio, offering political analysis for Huckabee's former employer, Fox News. The veteran campaign consultant says it won't be long until Huckabee is on the sidelines, too, watching the 2016 presidential race, while better-funded, higher-polling front-runners battle for the party's nomination.
"I have great affection for Mike, I wish him well, but at this point and time, [his is] a dead campaign. It's just a question of when they bury it," Rollins said in an interview this week.
Some others who worked for the former Arkansas governor in 2008 also say things look bleak for his campaign. Huckabee's supporters, meanwhile, contend he still has a chance.
Rollins, who managed President Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign, rattles off recent polls that show Huckabee trailing the pack. Low poll numbers have resulted in Huckabee not qualifying to debate other leading Republican presidential contenders, most recently in the main debate on Dec. 15 in Las Vegas. Instead, he faced off earlier in the evening with three other low-polling candidates.
"He's at 2 percent [nationally] today; 1 percent in Iowa, zero percent in New Hampshire, so there's no chance for him to do what he did eight years ago. There's just no momentum. No possibility," Rollins said.
The same problems that plagued Huckabee in his previous run have resurfaced, said Rollins, who isn't endorsing any of Huckabee's opponents.
"His organization didn't expand. It's really a family-run operation. Not that the people in his family aren't good operatives; he just didn't go out and try to get the top-notch people in the country. And even though he'd been on television for eight years and made a lot of money making speeches, he never expanded his political base and clearly has had no impact whatsoever," Rollins said.
The ex-governor also failed to build the kind of donor base that he needs to be competitive, Rollins said.
Eleven of his Republican opponents have collected more money than he has, according to the Federal Election Commission.
Through Sept. 30, Republican presidential candidates have raised $147.3 million, the FEC says. Huckabee's share of that is about $3.2 million, according to FEC reports.
Last week, the Huckabee campaign acknowledged that it has cut the salaries of some staff members to stretch its dollars. The campaign's longtime spokesman, former Little Rock television newscaster Alice Stewart, confirmed that she has departed.
Rollins said Huckabee is repeating the mistakes he made in the 2008 race, when money problems hobbled the campaign at key moments.
"He's done nothing to expand the money base, so he has no resources. ... He has no money, and you can't make it in this game unless you have the ability to raise money," Huckabee's former senior adviser said.
Rollins said he urged Huckabee to challenge Mitt Romney for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, but Huckabee sat out that race, forgoing his best shot at winning the White House.
"He always thought he wanted to run against Hillary," Rollins said, referring to Hillary Clinton, wife of former President Bill Clinton. She is a former Arkansas first lady and a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Eric Woolson, who was Huckabee's Iowa campaign manager in 2008, said the mood of the electorate has shifted sharply over the years.
The first time Huckabee ran, he told voters: "I'm a conservative, but I'm not mad at anybody about it," a message that captured the Iowan's attention.
"I think folks really liked that happy warrior idea, the happy warrior candidate eight years ago," said Woolson, who isn't aligned with any of the candidates. "This time around it seems like they want [somebody] angry. ... The electorate wants somebody who's mad. You know, a 'we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore' type of thing."
Voters have many more choices this time than they did in 2008, including a New York billionaire businessman. That candidate, Donald Trump, soaks up so much of the media spotlight that there's little left for the other candidates to scrap over, Woolson said.
"I think as you've seen the rise of Mr. Trump, you've seen the decline of a number of candidates. Unfortunately for the Huckabee campaign, Gov. Huckabee is one of them," Woolson said.
Huckabee, who led in some Iowa polls early this year, has watched his numbers slowly slide. The most recent polls have him capturing between 1 percent and 3 percent of the vote in that state.
Christopher Budzisz, an associate professor of political science at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, says support for Huckabee has fallen steadily over the past year.
"Mike Huckabee came into this race as a known quantity and someone that people still think of very fondly and favorably," he said. But many of the Christian conservatives who backed Huckabee last time around are now supporting other candidates. "This year if you're an evangelical voter, you're spoiled for choices on the Republican side," Budzisz said.
A pollster said Huckabee failed to build on his early support.
"Back in the early stages of this campaign, before Trump got into it, there was no clear front-runner, and Huckabee was one of those candidates who was clearly in contention. But he just never seemed to catch fire," said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute in West Long Branch, N.J. "There just didn't seem to be a thirst for another Huckabee campaign. The voters who were attracted to Huckabee in the past had found other candidates that they felt were more desirable in 2016."
In his home state of Arkansas, meanwhile, Huckabee lost a straw poll among Republican Party activists earlier this month to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Cruz, who appeared Tuesday in central Arkansas, says he'll work hard to win Arkansas' March 1 presidential primary.
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio's campaign announced Tuesday that a dozen Republican lawmakers have endorsed him, a Floridian.
Huckabee backers say the Feb. 1 Iowa caucus is still more than a month away and that victory is still attainable.
"You can't really go by the polls," said the Rev. Brad Sherman, pastor of Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville, Iowa, and the Iowa state chairman of Pastors for Huckabee. "To pull it off, it's all going to be about the ground game and how effective that is. There's still a lot of undecided people out there."
Huckabee spokesman Hogan Gidley said the election is "far from over" and that Huckabee is moving most of his staff in Little Rock, where the campaign is headquartered, north to Iowa.
"We'll probably have 30-35 staffers on the ground," Gidley said. "We've got to finish well here in Iowa. That's no secret."
Some of Huckabee's strongest supporters from 2008, including Christian conservative activist Bob Vander Plaats, have switched sides.
Vander Plaats leads a group known as The Family Leader that is influential among Iowa social conservatives. He backed Huckabee long before the Arkansas politician surged into the lead in the 2008 race in Iowa. And four years ago, Vander Plaats endorsed long-shot candidate Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania who went on to win the caucuses in 2012.
On Dec. 10, Vander Plaats endorsed Cruz, the candidate he says has fired up Iowa's conservative base.
Conservative activists still "love Gov. Huckabee and they love Rick Santorum, but in many ways they've moved on," Vander Plaats said. Voters seem to be saying, "'We're going to shake things up, and we're not going to take it anymore,'" the Iowan said. "That may fit Donald Trump pretty well, and it may fit Ted Cruz pretty well. It probably doesn't fit Gov. Huckabee very well. ... I think it's the year of the outsider. People do not want politics as usual any longer."
Asked if there's any path to victory in Iowa for Huckabee, Vander Plaats said: "You'd have to see a seismic collapse of one of the front-runners or a couple of front-runners, meaning Donald Trump would have to implode or Ted Cruz and Donald Trump would have to implode."
A Section on 12/23/2015