It’s an early mid-June evening in New Hampshire, and Asa Hutchinson — the former Arkansas governor and 2024 presidential candidate — is riding shotgun in a white Nissan SUV, fiddling with his iPhone after another day on the campaign trail. Between glances at his Twitter feed, he calls up the latest RealClearPolitics polling average for the 2024 Republican nomination and scrolls down to see the numbers: Former President Donald Trump, indicted just days prior for mishandling classified documents, towers over Ron DeSantis by 33 points — and the rest of the field by more than 50. Hutchinson then scrolls right a few touches, past several other single-digit hopefuls, to finally find his name: 8th place, 0.6 percent. (He has since bounced up to 1 percent — but still in 8th.)
Perusing the site’s videos section, Hutchinson — who appeared the day before on CNN’s State of the Union to defend the Justice Department and repeat his call for Trump to drop out — plays an interview from the same show with Vivek Ramaswamy promising the former president a Day One pardon, and swiftly closes it in disgust.
Hutchinson suddenly perks up at the sight of a POLITICO headline — “Haley changes tune, calls Trump ‘reckless'”– and reads the article aloud to the young aide in the driver’s seat, quoting rivals Nikki Haley and Tim Scott offering ramped-up, albeit milquetoast, criticism of Trump’s behavior in the case.
“Ha-ha!” Hutchinson chortles triumphantly. “Hey, we’re turning the tide! We’re impacting the debate!”
“Yeah,” the aide replies. “Now they just gotta let you up on stage.”
You might call Asa Hutchinson the apotheosis of what comedian Bill Maher has dubbed “Republican Classic”: Pro-life, pro-gun, pro-free trade; anti-debt, anti-Putin, anti-coup.
Kathryn Gamble for POLITICO
In another era, Asa Hutchinson — whose resume includes stints as a Congressman and U.S. attorney, leading roles at the DEA and Homeland Security, and two terms as a popular red-state governor — would have been a shoo-in for the first debate of a Republican primary, if not an instant contender for the nomination. You might call him the apotheosis of what comedian Bill Maher has dubbed “Republican Classic“: Pro-life, pro-gun, pro-free trade; anti-debt, anti-Putin, anti-coup. But Hutchinson has struggled amid the shifting sands of his party. While policy-wise, he remains mostly in lockstep — as governor, he signed one of the country’s strictest abortion bans — he lacks the fire-breathing, troll-the-libs ethos that animates much of the modern GOP, and has displayed an occasional bipartisan streak (while leading the National Governors Association, he backed President Biden’s infrastructure bill).
More crucially, he broke with Trump after the 2020 election and has emerged as one of the former president’s leading Republican critics. The net result: With less than two weeks until the Aug. 23 parley in Milwaukee, Hutchinson has yet to secure his spot on the debate stage. He’s cleared two of the Republican National Committee’s thresholds — garnering 1 percent in three polls and 200 donors in 20 states — but as of Thursday has just 22,000 of the required 40,000 donors, according to his campaign. Hutchinson has also balked at the RNC’s mandatory loyalty pledge. “I’m not going to vote for [Trump] if he’s a convicted felon,” Hutchinson told POLITICO reporters in June.
Hutchinson’s Trump-bashing has earned heckles from MAGA Republicans and outright mockery from his b?te noire. “I call him ‘Ada Hutchinson’,” Trump said at a June Fox News town hall. “I don’t call him Asa. This guy — nobody knows who the hell he is.” In July, at Iowa’s conservative Family Leadership Summit, a visibly unnerved Hutchinson was skewered by moderator Tucker Carlson over his support for the Covid vaccine and veto of a ban on “gender-affirming care” for transgender minors, to the delight of the Trump-friendly audience. Days later, at the young conservative Turning Point Action Conference, he was booed as he took the stage and struggled to deliver his speech over chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
Standing 6’1,” with ramrod posture and his white hair always arranged in a tidy combover, Asa Hutchinson has the look and vigor of someone a decade younger than his 72 years. (Until departing the governor’s mansion in January, he played full-court, 5-on-5 basketball nearly every Friday.) On this morning in New Hampshire, Hutchinson completed his morning hotel-room exercise routine (100 jumping jacks, 50 sit-ups, 20 pushups), donned one of his go-to outfits (blue blazer, white button-down, blue jeans), and is now being driven by his aide to an 8:30 a.m. meet-and-greet. At a cozy caf? in Bedford, N.H., beside a wall with a framed American flag and two mini-replica “Live Free or Die” license plates endorsing his rival — TRUMP2020, TRUMP2024 — Hutchinson engages in a standing Q&A with the roughly dozen Republicans in attendance. A man in a baseball cap begins by asking what differentiates him from the other candidates.
“Well, first of all, I’ll match my experience against anybody’s,” Hutchinson replies in his heavy Southern drawl. “Whenever you look at the cartels in Mexico, I was head of the DEA in the Bush Administration. That caused me to go to Mexico to meet with Vicente Fox. … I’ve been to the European Commission, negotiated data-sharing agreements so we could protect our country from a terrorist attack. In Congress, that was the last time we balanced the budget in our country.”
“I was impeachment manager, “he adds, “in the impeachment trial of William Jefferson Clinton — from my home state — and so I’ve paid my dues in the conservative political arena.”
Hutchinson proceeds to enumerate his proudest accomplishments as governor– slashing Arkansas’ income tax rate, leaving office with a $2 billion surplus, getting computer-science classes into all public schools, cutting the state workforce by 14 percent and resisting Covid shutdown pressures.
“Every business that provides a job for a family is an essential business, and so I kept them open,” he says, noting that Arkansas came second in the nation in days of in-classroom learning during the pandemic.
“We beat Florida,” he adds, to a collective chuckle.
The attendees pepper him with typical Republican questions, and Hutchinson responds with typical Republican answers.
Illegal immigration? He wants to ramp up border security and streamline the legal-immigration process.
Ukraine? He’s emphatically for continued U.S. support.
Energy policy? “President Biden made an error in going all green.”
But at nearly every campaign stop, at least one voter is there to remind Hutchinson of the vast chasm between the conservative movement of 2023 and the one that launched him into the political limelight decades ago.
Here, it is a middle-aged woman who asks how he will fix America’s “two-tiered justice system,” echoing Trump’s claim that he is being prosecuted for offenses that Obama and Hillary committed with impunity. An elderly woman chimes in: “How do we know who to believe?”
“Well, it’s hard,” Hutchinson replies. “I don’t excuse former President Trump’s behavior in how he handled classified information. I think those are serious charges. … What bothers me about what Trump’s allegations are is it includes obstruction. I mean, I prosecuted a president of the United States for obstruction of justice. As conservatives, we don’t want to undermine the rule of law.”
With the debate on his mind, Asa Hutchinson is staking his Hail-Mary campaign on the hope that — amid the brewing primary battle between Trump and Trump Lite — there is still a lane for Republican Classic. “I’ll end with the best compliment I’ve gotten so far in the campaign, and it’s from Iowa,” he tells the New Hampshire Republicans. “I’m talking to a constituent … and at the end of it, he looked at me and he said, ‘you know, you seem really normal.'”
Calling oneself a “Reagan conservative” has long been de rigueur for aspiring Republican politicians. But for Hutchinson, the label fits — and helps explain why Hutchinson, though not initially a Never Trumper, has always been an awkward fit with the MAGA GOP.
Born in December 1950, the youngest of six children, Hutchinson was raised on a 280-acre farm in northwest Arkansas’s Benton County, a stubbornly red corner of a then-solidly blue state. Though his parents were not terribly partisan — the two split their votes in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race — a 13-year-old Hutchinson began to identify with the GOP in 1964, when he and elder brother Tim, a future U.S. senator, watched Ronald Reagan deliver his “Time for Choosing” speech in support of Barry Goldwater. Asa followed Tim to the evangelical Bob Jones University in South Carolina and then returned home to attend law school at the University of Arkansas, where he first crossed paths with a young professor named Bill Clinton.
“We ran in different circles,” he remembers.
(Clockwise from left) Hutchinson as a young boy; with his mother Virginia and brother Tim at the U.S. Capitol; and with his parents, wife Susan and four children.
