Outspoken support for same-sex marriage is apparently not seen as an asset in Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign, and Bob Wickers – a veteran pollster and strategist who prepares to lead the former Arkansas governor's second run – has toned down his once favorable views on such unions, Time reported.

In 2013, Wickers had been part of an amicus brief encouraging the Supreme Court to overturn California's same-sex marriage ban. But when a larger group of operatives this year signed a similar document asking the nation's highest tribunal to allow gay unions nationwide, his name was absent, the magazine detailed.

Wickers declined to offer an on-the-record explanation for his change of heart, but he is not the only GOP heavyweight who dropped from the list: David Kochel, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's campaign manager-designate, was similarly part of the 2013 effort but not the one in 2015.

Huckabee, a conservative Republican who unsuccessfully ran for his party's nomination in 2008, has criticized the "militant gay community" and its opposition to "religious liberty" laws in Indiana and Arkansas, LGBTQ Nation recalled.

"It won't stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel, and I'm talking now about the unabridged, unapologetic Gospel that is really God's truth," the former governor alleged.

During his second presidential bid, Huckabee plans to brand himself as an "economic populist and foreign affairs hawk who holds deeply conservative views on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage," according to the website.

The announcement of his candidacy comes as the Supreme Court is considering a landmark case that could legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. If the justices were to take such a step, states should challenge their "notion of judicial supremacy" and insist that "one branch of government does not overrule the other two," Huckabee has said, according to the Huffington Post.

"Constitutionally, the courts cannot make a law, they can interpret one and then the legislature has to create enabling legislation and the executive has to sign it and has to enforce it," the former governor insisted.