‘A Governor Who Doesn’t Seem to Have Much Interest in Governing Arkansas’

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas — Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders assumed a podium on a recent spring morning in Arkansas, her familiar voice instantly evoking her pugnacious press conferences under Donald Trump. That day, there were no reporters to spar with, nor culture wars to wage, only a few dozen Arkansans who’d come to applaud millions in ongoing state grants for playgrounds and parks. “When my kids were younger, we could plan a huge trip just to find out that our kids would prefer to actually play on a jungle gym or a swing set,” she said. The 41-year-old governor wore an above-the-knee metallic skirt and pumps, a millennial-friendly outfit that matched her refreshed brand as the youngest governor in the country. She reminisced about her husband, Bryan, planning outdoor adventures with their three children, “some of which I am glad that I went on.” The crowd, which included Bryan, laughed.

Sanders was a long way from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018, when she sat silently, a rictus fixed on her face, as comedianne Michelle Wolf joked about her burning facts and using the ash “to create a perfect smoky eye.” The former White House press secretary made her name defending Trump’s version of reality, while whittling down the actual press briefing. To her supporters, she played the outsider in Washington who couldn’t be corrupted by the D.C. establishment.

Now that she’s returned home, they say she still puts Arkansas first. In a close-knit state where some of Sanders’ colleagues have known her since college or younger, they insist her time with Trump didn’t fundamentally change her. Washington was one of her adventures, some of which she’s glad she went on. And many people in Arkansas love her for the same reason her national audience does: “She’s a fighter, an amazing communicator, and people connect to her,” Chris Caldwell, her 2022 campaign manager, told me.

But she has brought her experience in Trump’s Washington back with her. She shows little trust in the media. She cruises between events in a black SUV with tinted windows, accompanied by a state police detail in suits and a comms director who worked for Trump and his 2020 presidential campaign. At open-press events, she takes so few questions, Arkansas reporters are fatalistic about the idea of asking many. Instead, as befits a national figure with national ambitions — she’s shown up on lists as a possible running mate for Trump — she reaches her audience on her terms, including on Fox News, or Instagram and Elon Musk’s X, where she has over 2.3 million collective followers. At times, she seems to govern for the latter. Arkansas may not share a border with Mexico, but she has traveled to Eagle Pass, Texas, and talked about the border crisis on Fox & Friends. And sent down the Arkansas National Guard. Arkansas has long allowed gender-neutral IDs, of which there are a few hundred issued, but she justified banning them in the state, using the same playbook from the Republican war on trans rights.

Sanders sees the concerns of Arkansans as the same as America’s, and her actions delight many Arkansans. (“That was a bold move,” a woman I met at a coffee shop in Little Rock told me of Sanders’ decision to deploy the National Guard. “I like bold moves.”) Yet there are rumblings — angry educators, cowed Republicans, a falling approval rating, the sense that Sanders is auditioning for a bigger role. During my reporting, it was hard not to notice that, less than two years into Sanders’ tenure, her governorship had disappointed some people closer to home. Arkansans who voted for her. Independents. An old guard of Republicans. Even former allies of her dad.

Rex Nelson, who spent almost a decade as the policy and communications director for her father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, said he’s seen the frustration that Republicans have with Sanders continue to build. “We are in a weird position,” he said, “of having a governor in this state who doesn’t seem to have much interest in governing Arkansas.”

None of it poses a threat to her formidable political power. (Republicans “might be frustrated with her, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t know she has a bottomless war chest and that she’ll primary them without batting an eye,” as Austin Bailey, the editor of The Arkansas Times, put it.) Though during my strange Sanders tour of Arkansas, I increasingly found myself questioning how anyone could tell if it did.

Sanders went into the lobby of the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism to pose for photos with town representatives and their oversized checks. The towns of Arkansas were summoned from a line to meet her. (“Who’s next? Come on down, Camden.”) I’d asked a youthful aide in a crisp blue suit, who turned out to be Sam Dubke, Sanders’ deputy comms director and speechwriter, about the possibility of interview time. Dubke, who is from Virginia and the son of Trump’s former (but briefly) communications director, Michael, referred me to Alexa Henning, Sanders’ comms director. I hovered near Henning while Sanders’ security detail intimated distance with their eyes. Henning promised media availability the next day. “I’ll email you,” she said.

After photos, Sanders and her team returned to their SUVs and drove away. Her media schedule had ended, but her day had just begun. She had a Lincoln Day dinner to attend that night with House Speaker Mike Johnson in Arkadelphia. Imagine the overwhelming applause when Sanders was introduced. I tried to imagine it, as journalists weren’t allowed.

‘She’s controlling the message’

When Sanders ran for governor in 2022, it was clear she didn’t plan to follow the same path as her dad, who served in office from 1996 or 2007, or her predecessor, former Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson, both of whom came up in a different political context, one where they had to work with Democrats. But neither did observers assume that she would model her approach after her former boss from the White House. “She’s been in politics for a long time,” said Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, from “literally growing up in the governor’s mansion” to managing his Senate campaign. “Sanders is certainly her own person. She’s a very strong personality,” he told me. She was also incredibly well-funded, with money surging in from out of state.

Sanders’ primary challenger was a podcaster who opposed Covid-19 vaccine requirements and accused her of being a “Republican In Name Only.” He said the 2020 presidential election was stolen. She sidestepped the issue and defeated him by some 65 points. During the general election, she largely followed a national script. Even her state proposal, phasing out Arkansas’ income tax, came with an ad blaming Biden and Kamala Harris for inflation.

Until recently, Arkansas has stubbornly resisted national political trends. It’s a socially conservative state that voted for Trump by a 28-point margin in 2020, but it’s also a state where the modern Republican Party developed on a separate track from the rest of the South. It was the last state in the region to flip red, according to Angie Maxwell, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. While national Republican strategists were courting white Democrats in the South who opposed civil rights, Arkansas was shaped in the late ’60s and ’70s by the politics of Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, a moderate Republican, she said. That Republican Party history, coupled with hometown pride in Democrats such as Bill Clinton, helped Democrats remain competitive in the state for longer. (Democrats held control of the state Legislature from Reconstruction through 2013.) “Sanders is unique,” Maxwell said, in that “she’s so closely tied with the national party.”

When Sanders overwhelmingly won her general election, she entered office buoyed by the goodwill of a Republican supermajority, some of whom described her as a kind of returning hometown hero. “She went through so much [just] with the media” and “the harshness of that world,” said Republican state Sen. Breanne Davis. But when she came back, “she was the exact same person that I remembered in college.”

Still, there were early signs that Sanders was more influenced by D.C. She showed little interest in engaging with the Arkansas press during her campaign. “With freedom of the press comes a great deal of responsibility,” she said in October 2022. “When they don’t live up to their end of the bargain, it forces some of us to go outside the box.” Going “outside the box” looked rather hermetic. Once she was in office, Arkansas reporters quickly found her more closed off than Hutchinson and Huckabee. Her dad held monthly on-the-record luncheons with reporters and personally returned media calls, according to Nelson, and he could be grabbed walking into the Capitol. Sanders made herself available in highly controlled circumstances. One reporter described her team’s PR strategy as superficial, with Henning, her comms director, turning to X early on to go after Sanders’ critics.

“I’ve sat there and watched them spend, like, 30 minutes on flag placement. Everything is so meticulously crafted,” said a reporter in Arkansas, who was granted anonymity to share personal observations outside of their employer. “It’s weird, because Arkansas is just not like that … especially after Asa Hutchinson, he was so chill, you know, he ran for president and got 189 votes [in Iowa], but everyone [seemed like they] liked him,” the reporter said.

Roby Brock, who has interviewed Sanders multiple times on his Arkansas show, Talk Business & Politics, and worked around or covered five other governors, said Sanders takes fewer press questions for shorter periods of time than her predecessors and doesn’t provide much advance notice for press conferences, which can make them difficult to schedule. But he pointed out that’s her prerogative, and she has more ways to reach her audience directly. “The plus for her in doing that is she obviously feels like she’s controlling the message,” he said. “Speaking for myself, and generally, there’s not always a context in there. Sometimes there’s another side of the story.”

Sanders often turns to Fox News. When her children drew a chalk cross in front of the governor’s mansion, she defended it on national television. “An out-of-control leftist group demanded that I erase the cross,” she said. She issued executive orders that seemed ready-made for chyrons, such as banning state documents from including the words “Latinx,” “womxn,” “pregnant people” and “menstruating people.” She signed an anti-trans bathroom bill and legislation to facilitate malpractice suits against doctors who provide gender-affirming care. “[The left is] telling people that if you wear makeup, and you shop online, and you cry sometimes, then you, too, can be a woman,” she said on Fox, introducing her “Real Woman” beer koozies intended to troll Bud Light over its inclusive (and very brief) advertising campaign.

At home, the Republican supermajority swiftly passed the LEARNS Act, a sweeping school voucher program overseen by an education official hailing from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Florida, which raised minimum teacher salaries to $50,000, though scrapped a prior requirement for scheduled pay raises based on experience. It was a landmark bill for Sanders, signed early in her administration. But it also faced a bumpier rollout and more mixed reception than its expedient passage suggested. The concerns about LEARNS ranged from rural districts not wanting to subsidize private schools in suburban and urban areas to its anti-critical race theory language, which a lawsuit argues was used to unconstitutionally attack AP African American studies at Central High School in Little Rock, a city that is over 40 percent Black. (Sanders said of the lawsuit: “It’s sad the radical left continues to lie.”) When I asked Jacob Oliva, the state Education Department secretary, what concerns he’d heard, he said that some superintendents were worried about funding the teacher raises. Once they hear it’s coming from an additional pot of money, “they’re relieved and excited,” he said.

In September, Sanders faced a rare legislative setback when she tried to hatchet the state’s Freedom of Information Act in a special session after an attorney and blogger who now reports for The Arkansas Times sought her travel records. He then revealed a $19,000 lectern that she had purchased, which later raised legal questions. Sanders claimed FOIA put her family’s security at risk but sought to restrict a broader range of records. She was hardly the first Republican to target the state’s strong public records law, but she appeared to underestimate both the extent to which Arkansans supported it and the vigor of the Arkansas press. After a flood of public testimony against it, the Legislature passed a significantly weaker version.

It wasn’t the only local issue that chafed Arkansans. Sanders’ husband, Bryan, whose background is in political messaging and advertising, wanted to use that approach to market Arkansas’ natural beauty. Sanders appointed him chair of the Natural State Advisory Council. But when a holding company co-founded by Walmart heir Tom Walton, who serves on the council, floated the idea of redesignating land near the Buffalo National River as a national park and preserve via federal legislation, irate locals, concerned about possible influence from Bryan’s council, turned out in droves and set out an empty chair with Sanders’ and Bryan’s names on it.

“I don’t know how many people I’ve had say to me, had I known what [state government] was going to look like under Gov. Sanders, I wouldn’t have voted for her,” said state Rep. Jim Wooten, one of the few Republicans to vote against the LEARNS Act, citing the “disdain” Sanders and the Legislature had shown toward public education. A University of Arkansas poll conducted in October showed her with a lower approval rating than her two predecessors and her dad when he left office. (A person close to the governor rejected the comparison on the grounds that they faced different times and circumstances.)

Sanders’ critics have turned to lawsuits and ballot initiatives. Her supporters are inclined to frame such attacks as coming from the left. That doesn’t always appear to be the case. Sanders is in an unlikely legal battle against Republican appointees over the independence of the state corrections board. It started when Sanders brought in a corrections head from Arizona, tried to make him answerable to her as opposed to the board, and sought to add more beds while clamping down on early release. Board members, concerned about prison safety, fired her corrections head. Sanders accused them of “power grabs.” (“There’s [only] so many beds,” said Williams Byers, a Hutchinson appointee, with a grim laugh. “If anybody comes in, somebody’s got to go out.”) Meanwhile, a proposed ballot initiative to enshrine government transparency in the state constitution has a surprisingly diverse coalition, from the nonpartisan Arkansas Press Association to a Trump-supporting county Republican party chair rallying bikers to sign it. Of the coalition supporting it, Nate Bell, an ex-Republican representative turned independent and political consultant, joked: “Just about the only thing we agree on politically is disclosure matters.”

Last year, a chicken company marketing to environmentally conscious consumers abruptly closed, leaving contracted Arkansas farmers responsible for chickens they couldn’t sell. In December, Bryan King, a farmer and Republican state senator, sent a letter to Sanders asking her to declare a state of emergency and for the growers and feed suppliers to be financially compensated. “The state should have [taken] over the situation like an oil spill,” King told me. The Arkansas secretary of Agriculture, a Sanders reappointee, denied his request, noting that the state couldn’t assume responsibility for a company simply because it was in tough financial straits. The state decided to euthanize over a million birds. King called the state moving in without due process for the farmers “the most communist thing I’ve ever seen.” (Attorneys for the company listed on a bankruptcy petition and the Agriculture Department did not respond to requests for comment.)

At the time, Henning, Sanders’ comms director, wrote on X: “‘Conservatives’ shouldn’t ask for government bailouts of private businesses on the backs of Arkansas taxpayers.”

Dustin Maybee, one of the poultry farmers, told me he and his wife repeatedly called a number he found for the governor’s office, but he didn’t get a response. (He said his wife was told to stop calling.) When the state crew came to his farm to suffocate the birds with foam, Maybee invited a local news station, then tried to film on his own using a GoPro after the state said the news station couldn’t be on his property. The crew then left without euthanizing his birds, leaving Maybee with no financial ability to feed them for a week. (“House 1 empty, House 2 empty, House 3 empty … ” he wrote on Christmas.) “My daughter, she always walked the [chicken] houses with me. She’s a little trouper. But I had to quit letting her go in there, because they was dying so fast, and they was eating each other — I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t afford any help,” he said. “It was just horrible.” Maybee said he’d felt before that Sanders had been doing a good job as governor. But “what’s so wrong with at least having a secretary call back?” he wondered.

In response to a list of questions, including about Maybee, Henning wrote: “Governor Sanders, who won by historic margins, is proud of the bold, transformational changes she has implemented.”

‘What else was I supposed to do?’

The morning after the Republican fundraising dinner, I drove about a hundred miles northeast of Little Rock to Wynne, Arkansas, where trees and roofs were still shorn from a tornado in March 2023 that killed four people and destroyed Wynne High School. Sanders had come to support Wynne and declare the town of about 8,200 a “Capital for a Day,” a program where she and state officials tour Arkansas and meet locals, arranging photo-ops along the way. In the town of Magnolia, her previous stop on the tour, Sanders blew up a dam and posted a video of it on Instagram with the hashtag #DrainTheSwamp.

At the temporary high school in Wynne, a row of identical, windowless gray barracks served as a tornado shelter. The children were missing, giving the campus a desolate feeling, though Dubke, the deputy comms director, reassured me that they were only on spring break. “We were worried — we were like, are they going to think we like, shut down the school?” he joked. In truth, such power had not occurred to me until then.

I idled around the school library and spoke with Stephanie Lyons, the elementary assistant superintendent. She praised the support from the Sanders administration after the natural disaster. “We’ve actually had state people here walking the grounds with us every day,” she said. Sanders appeared with Oliva, the education secretary, who shares a vague resemblance to Jeff Bezos. She introduced a $111,050 tutoring grant to help students. “It’s things like LEARNS that have helped provide these types of grants,” she told the educators, then thanked them for “being a bright spot in what could be a really terrible thing.” She presented another giant check. I was feeling rebellious against my tour. I chatted with what appeared to be the sole teenager slouched in a chair. Then I spotted the familiar wavy hair and plaid blazer of Sanders’ husband, Bryan, and went up to chat.

Bryan said they didn’t take a position on the Buffalo National River controversy but described it as a case of those pushing for tourism versus conservationists and put himself on the side of conservation. Given that it would require an act of Congress, and nothing had been presented, “I don’t see that moving at any point soon,” he said. Dubke had hastened over with his own recorder, as aides apparently did with certain media encounters. I asked Bryan what Sanders would do if asked to serve as vice president. “She loves her job,” Bryan said.

Sanders and her entourage went to tour the school. Journalists — there appeared to be four of us — were not allowed. “No media,” a member of her group reiterated to our photographer on the sidewalk. Standing on the quiet, empty campus, I heard people cheer. Our photographer, who managed to snag a few shots before the glare of a staffer encouraged him to back off, reported that they were playing basketball, but how could we tell if Sanders made a shot through the dark glass?

We were hastened to Hot Stone Pizza, where, for a while, a few Wynne men and I watched her aides set up three Arkansas flags and three American flags and arrange tables in the middle of the restaurant. “I came here because there ain’t nothing else to do,” one told me. I felt kinship with Wynne, though unsure where Sanders’ Arkansas ended and real Arkansas began. Once the stage was set, and more people had crowded into the restaurant, Sanders appeared like a headlining act. Wynne lined up to meet her.

Jamie Andrews, a mother with straight brown hair and bright eyes, had driven 15 miles from Forrest City with her 11-year-old daughter and her 6-year-old son, Jake, who has cerebral palsy and microcephaly. Last year, the Sanders administration moved quickly to remove tens of thousands of children from Medicaid as a federal Covid policy came to an end, raising concerns that eligible people might be disenrolled. (A spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Human Services wrote that Arkansas “made significant efforts to ensure that every eligible child and family in the state-maintained coverage.”)

Andrews, who tries to carefully stay on top of her paperwork, couldn’t get a straight answer as to why, after the unwinding period in the winter, Jake lost his Medicaid and other coverage. Because he lost coverage for his daycare and therapies, she had to take care of him, leading her to be fired from her full-time job at a therapy business, which supplemented her husband’s income.

At the event, Andrews moved her son, whom she calls a wiggle worm, between his stroller and her arms, which were lined with scratches, bites and bruises. As Andrews explained her situation, Sanders was sympathetic and took Jake. He tried to bite her arm. The governor remained calm. Andrews apologized. “I just feel like I embarrassed her,” Andrews worried to me later about her interaction with the governor. “But what else was I supposed to do? I went through all the proper channels.” Andrews, who said she voted for Sanders, understood why she wanted to reduce government dependency, but wished more vetting had been done. She said she had a helpful meeting with the health secretary at the restaurant. When I checked in with her later, a representative of the governor’s office had reached out to tell her to reapply. She sounded frustrated to be submitting paperwork yet again. Recently, she learned that her request for unemployment benefits had been denied, as she couldn’t work “due to the necessity of caring for a member of your family.” She was ineligible until “this condition no longer exists,” read the notice. “As if my son will just wake up one day and not be disabled,” Andrews wrote me in disbelief. (The day before this story was published, she said she received a call from the daycare: Jake got Medicaid coverage, backdated to Dec. 1, and would be in school on Monday.)

After Sanders spoke in Wynne, she came to gaggle with the press. It was just me and two reporters on the tornado beat. “I’m Sarah,” she said, introducing herself to me in a straightforward way. One reporter had questioned me earlier if the Sarah who seemed to hate the press in Washington was the real Sarah. Of course, that distinction had long ago ceased to matter. I opened my notebook with the dozens of questions I’d collected from talking to Arkansans. Afraid of time, and a little unsure after she made a joke about preferring to eat pizza [rather] than talk to us, I turned to questions on national issues.

Would she support deploying the National Guard to blue states to conduct immigration enforcement if Trump is reelected? “Certainly,” she said. “The difference is if you have President Trump in office, that demand is not going to be as high because the federal government will actually step up.” There was no podium, yet she moved seamlessly back into volleying with a press corps of three. Did she support a federal abortion ban, and at what week of gestation? “I don’t think that we should have abortion at any point,” she said. Did she support protecting IVF treatments in Arkansas? “I do,” she said. “I have a lot of friends who have been through that process and would certainly make sure we protect the ability to do that in the state.” Did Israel need to be doing more to protect Palestinian lives? “We have to stand with Israel,” she said. “My position hasn’t changed.” She started to walk away. “Thanks so much, guys,” she said. Between the questions from me and the other reporters about Wynne — one became emboldened to ask if we might see a Trump-Sanders White House — about six minutes had passed.

Sanders knew who her audience was. At least, she knew it wasn’t us.

As I drove a hundred miles back to Little Rock, I thought about how Arkansans speculated, sometimes proudly, other times derisively, about what Sanders was running for. Reelection? (Caldwell is already the senior adviser for her 2026 reelection campaign.) Vice president? President? Maybe it doesn’t matter which Sanders is for the national stage, and which one is for Arkansas, if even she can no longer tell them apart.

“I’m working hard to make sure President Trump gets elected,” Sanders said. “But as long as I get to be the governor of Arkansas, I’m hopeful I get to do that for the next seven years.”

The next day, in Jacksonville, I found myself waiting in the parking lot of the rebuilt New Commandment Church in Christ, the original building destroyed by the tornado last year. Edrian Miller, the daughter of the pastor, told me that Sanders “showed up in one of [our] times of need, and I think that shows a lot about who she is.” Church-members, police officers, and aides gathered around the pastor and Sanders to pray. Then they went inside the church, and Dubke gently instructed the handful of remaining journalists not to follow.