Mike Huckabee: ‘I Plan To Finish First In Iowa’

GOP presidential candidate former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee tells Breitbart News Daily host Stephen K. Bannon that he believes he can win Iowa.

“I plan to finish first in Iowa,” Huckabee said on Thursday morning. “I know a lot of people have written me off, but they wrote me off eight years ago. They wrote Rick Santorum off four years ago. I’m still counting that we’re going to have a big surprise for people on February first.”

“This is not a surrender. This is an all out declaration,” Huckabee charged, adding that he wouldn’t be working this hard if he didn’t think he can win.

“There is no short cut here,” he continued, explaining that candidates can send out mailers and buy up all of the radio and TV ads in Iowa, “but bottom line, if you don’t come out here and look these folks in the eye, shake their hand and ask for their vote, when it really comes down to voting they’re not going to vote for you.”

Huckabee is familiar with how voters in Iowa tend to think, as Huckabee won the Iowa caucus in 2008 when he last ran for President of the United States.

“I’m convinced that when people sit down and think about it they know that they need somebody who has effectively governed and knows how to lead,” Huckabee added.

Huckabee joined Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM from the campaign trail in Iowa.

“We’re going to actually hit our milestone of having conducted town halls in every one of the 99 counties of Iowa,” Huckabee told Bannon, adding that he is doing 150 events in the Hawkeye state in January.

He said that when he is out in the “grassroots of America” he is learning that “people are not just angry,” they are in a “rage” because the Republican Party hasn’t responded to President Obama’s continuous overreach.

“I would repeal every one of Obama’s executive orders,” Huckabee vowed, adding that it’s best to “wipe the slate clean” since most of Obama’s executive orders were power grabs.

He wants to return to checks and balances with the three branches of government, adding that, “we quit letting the Supreme Court act like it’s the supreme being.”

Huckabee also said he would also stop trade deals that are “costing millions of Americans their jobs.”