Mike Huckabee

He served as lieutenant governor of Arkansas before serving in the state’s top post from 1996 to 2007.

He was the host of “Huckabee” on Fox News from 2008 to January 2015.

He and his wife have three children.

His stand (entering the race)

Mike Huckabee, who excited evangelical voters in his first presidential race in 2008 and retained much of their good will, announced on Tuesday, May 5, that he would again seek the Republican nomination despite a crowded field of rivals for his natural base in the party.

A former Southern Baptist pastor and Arkansas governor, Huckabee returned in hopes of once more dominating among social conservatives, but he was acutely aware he needed broader support to avoid the snares of last time, when he ran dry of money and failed to appeal much beyond the South.

After describing a childhood of school prayer, fishing for catfish and running for student council in Hope, Huckabee said, “So it seems perfectly fitting that it would be here that I announce I am a candidate for president of the United States.”

It was no small detail that he declared his candidacy in Hope, where he was born. Its fame as the hometown of an even better-known Arkansas politician, Bill Clinton, highlights a major theme of Huckabee’s 2016 pitch — that he is well suited to be the Republican nemesis for Hillary Rodham Clinton, if she becomes the Democratic nominee, because Huckabee spent years in state politics fighting what he calls the “Clinton machine.”

Like Bill Clinton, Huckabee grew up with little and casts himself as a populist champion of the working class, though with conservative solutions. He attacked trade deals that “drive wages lower than the Dead Sea” and implicitly rebuked Jeb Bush for recently proposing to raise the age for collecting Social Security benefits.

On the day Hillary Clinton entered the race, Huckabee tweeted her on Twitter: “Your announcement makes me nostalgic for our days doing political battle in Arkansas.”

The biggest question in voters’ minds about Huckabee, who seemed to add a final punctuation mark to his political career by skipping the 2012 presidential race, may be why he has returned to the fray.

Although American politics is full of stories of the ultimate triumph of also-rans, from Richard M. Nixon to Ronald Reagan, Huckabee would seem to face greater obstacles than during his first presidential campaign, when he battled only a couple of rivals for the party’s conservative base.

Now several candidates appeal to social conservatives, and Huckabee’s party has moved further rightward. He is vulnerable to criticism for positions he once held in favor of the Common Core education standards and a cap-and-trade program to fight global warming.

His support

Huckabee, 60, has a colorful biography to draw on in a field where many candidates reach for an up-by-the-bootstraps family tale.

“My mom lived in a house with dirt floors, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, so I know what the American Dream looks like, ” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I’m the first male in my family to ever graduate high school, much less go to college.”

The son of a firefighter in Hope, Ark. —- the hometown he shares with President Bill Clinton —- Huckabee went into the ministry and broadcasting before launching a political career.

A rare Republican officeholder, he was elected lieutenant governor and then became what foes called “the accidental governor” when his Democratic predecessor was convicted of fraud in 1996.

He went on to win two full terms, serving a total of 10 1/2 years.

Virtually unknown nationally, Huckabee announced his first White House bid after leaving the governor’s mansion in 2007. His surprise win in the Iowa caucuses came after Huckabee emerged as the natural candidate for social conservatives against foes such as John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani.

Strategists for Huckabee are counting on his likability — a folksy charm that a national audience got to know during his six years as a Fox News host — to break through the pack of competitors.

In announcing his run, he deployed his affability in making a series of jabs at rivals that, in the mouth of another politician, could have seemed angry. He criticized candidates who deceive taxpayers and “live off the government payroll” while running for higher office — an elbow aimed at most of the current Republican field. “Have the integrity and decency to resign,” Huckabee said.

His critics

Huckabee has also sought to paint himself as the most pro-Israel candidate in a field full of Middle East hawks.

This summer he made waves by saying President Barack Obama was marching Israelis to “the door of the oven” by striking a nuclear deal with Iran.

It wasn’t a gaffe. Huckabee refused to apologize for invoking the Holocaust, despite condemnation for playing the Hitler card. His daughter and campaign manager, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said Huckabee was repeatedly stopped on the street in Israel last month, one of dozens of Holy Land trips he’s taken over the years, by people who praised him for the remark.

“He says what he believes, ” Sanders said. “And so he’s not going to come back after getting beat up by the press a couple times and say: ‘Oh, wait, y’all didn’t like that? I’m sorry.’”

Yet on economic matters, he breaks with Republican orthodoxy. Huckabee said he’ll fight to maintain Social Security and Medicare, as other candidates look to make cuts because of concerns about the nation’s long-term debt.

Governing a poverty-stricken state still dominated by Democrats led Huckabee to an economic record that is in many ways out of step with the modern Republican Party. Huckabee raised sales taxes and the minimum wage, and he increased spending with a new health care program for children.

Such policies earned him the enmity of the Club for Growth, the deep-pocketed fiscal conservative group that released an ad hitting Huckabee on the day he entered the race this year.

Rex Nelson, Huckabee’s communications director when he was governor, said such criticism galls him.

“If he had been an ideologue I guess he would have made that small group happy, but he wouldn’t have gotten anything done, ” Nelson said.