HOPE, Ark. — Hillary Rodham Clinton starred in two presidential campaign launches this week. Neither was her own.

The leading Democrat was featured prominently by two Republican contenders, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former technology executive Carly Fiorina, whose road to relevancy in 2016 may be inextricably tied to the former first lady. As other Republicans begin to jab each other, both Fiorina’s and Huckabee’s nascent campaigns are based on the notion that they are uniquely positioned to defeat Clinton.

Both may be overstating their cases.

Huckabee didn’t explicitly mention Clinton on Tuesday even as he began a second presidential bid in the hometown he shares with her husband, Bill Clinton, the 42nd president. Yet the strategy was clear, as Huckabee and his senior aides cast him as a conservative populist outsider and the only Republican to have successfully taken on the Clinton political machine.

The opening frames of Huckabee’s campaign video featured a black-and-white photo of the Clintons. In his speech, Huckabee recalled “challenging the deeply entrenched political machine that ran this state.” Later, he took a swipe at Hillary Clinton, noting that he doesn’t “have a global foundation” to help start his campaign.