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Less than a month out from the Republican National Committee’s Aug. 23 debate in Milwaukee, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson’s effort to make himself the anti-Donald Trump candidate of choice in the 2024 GOP primary is getting plenty of attention: a flattering Washington Post op-ed on Saturday, an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday and a CNN appearance this week to comment on Trump’s most recent indictment.
The problem is, it’s not landing with Republican voters. Or donors. With a meager 1.0% in a recent New York Times/Siena poll (FiveThirtyEight says it’s more like 0.7%), Hutchinson needs to score 40,000 unique campaign donors, stat. Otherwise, he won’t qualify for the stage in Milwaukee, denying him the crucial visibility the debate will afford to voters not already pledging devout allegiance to a thrice-indicted Trump.
Summer 2023 Asa is much like the Asa of any other season, with some slight center-right-leaning modifications for maximum political viability: He’s sensible! He’s your grandfather’s conservative! He believes in tax cuts and small government!
Asked what his platform was on a podcast for The Bulwark — a conservative anti-Trump media outlet — Hutchinson said this: “A conservative is someone who believes in individual responsibility, equal opportunity, and a limited role of government. … A view of America that is one of strength, and that strength helps keep peace in the world.” As governor of Arkansas, he said, he “lowered taxes from 7% down to 4.9%” and raised teacher pay. “We had 3,000 fewer state employees when I left the governorship,” he said. “We should grow the private sector of our economy more than the public sector.”
Perhaps Hutchinson’s main pitch to Trump-skeptic Republicans, though, is that he understands (and believes in) law enforcement. A former federal prosecutor, it’s a case he can plausibly make, if anyone is willing to listen.
In a moment when the Trump campaign is filling its coffers by christening campaign donors as warriors against a weaponized FBI and Tom Cotton’s email dispatches declare the Trump indictment is “taking us into third world, banana republic territory,” Hutchinson’s measured stance stands out. “This indictment goes to the heart of our democracy, and to the heart of what it means to be an American and to peacefully transfer power from one administration to the next,” Hutchinson told CNN this week. Trump has done irreparable damage to the rule of law, Hutchinson says, and the Justice Department must do its work independently of presidential machinations.
Our justice system, Hutchinson told the host of “Face the Nation,” is “the envy of the world.” Instead of attacking the FBI’s credibility, he says, or taking radical steps like firing over half of federal employees, as would Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Hutchinson says we should reform the bureau. Hutchinson’s plan, as he outlined it in late July, includes giving the Drug Enforcement Agency full reign over drug enforcement responsibilities, requiring FBI agents to record their interviews and establishing a commission to decide which federal agencies should be able to wield guns and arrest people. (Ninety agencies is way too many, Asa says; perhaps the folks working for the postal service and the federal agriculture department don’t need to pack heat as part of their job description?)
And, The Washington Post notes, Hutchinson’s CV makes him more of an authority on the subject than most other candidates. Hutchinson was Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security under President George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security, served on the Select Committee on Intelligence when he was in Congress and ran Bush’s DEA in the early aughts.
Will any of it make a difference in the race? Probably not. Hutchinson continues to face the same Trump-sized hurdle as his competition; namely, that he’s got no choice but to frame his candidacy in response to a frenzied-up far-right fanbase and must pitch his decidedly grandfatherly and un-sexy ideas to a TV audience that’s been courted for years with the full technicolor complement of Trump theatrics, non sequiturs and bombshells.
To Hutchinson’s credit, though, it’s not just Trump that he’s pushing back against — he’s also been willing to take a stand against some of the crueler and wackier tendencies of the contemporary right. For example, he’s defended his 2021 veto of the Arkansas state legislature’s SAFE (Save Adolescents from Experimentation) Act as governor — the bill that sought to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youths in Arkansas. “You are starting to let lawmakers interfere with health care and set a standard for legislation overriding health care,” Hutchinson told ABC at the time. “The state should not presume to jump into every ethical health decision.” (The legislature overrode the veto and passed the bill into law anyway.)
Hutchinson’s decision was unpopular among conservatives at the time. Since then, as anti-trans fervor on the right has picked up momentum, it’s only become more so. But in his recent interview with The Bulwark, Hutchinson stood by his veto, which was reinforced earlier this year when U.S. District Judge James Moody struck down the Arkansas ban.
“There’s always a line to be drawn,” Hutchinson said. “But if you’re looking at temporary treatments that parents decide with their doctors are necessary, I stand with parents. And so I vetoed that bill. I was overridden, but the courts have held that was unconstitutional, which affirms what I did was the right thing.”
And, dystopian and surreal as it seems that a candidate would need to clarify whether he believed slavery is wrong, Hutchinson was asked by the podcast host to respond to recent controversy about how racism is covered in school classrooms, undoubtedly because Republican candidate Ron DeSantis is genuinely out here sounding like chattel slavery was kinda like career training for enslaved Americans. The Florida governor has been defending his state’s updated Black history education standards, which say students should learn how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
“That is impossible,” Hutchinson said of the Florida standards. “It’s just flat out wrong. It’s like taking us back to the ’50s or the Jim Crow days, and that’s the wrong direction for America. It is critically important that our young people understand what happened in the Civil Rights Movement, what happened [with] the oppression of African Americans all across the country during the days of Jim Crow.
“In Arkansas, we had the Elaine race massacre … In Tulsa, you had the bombing of the African American community,” he continued. “These are things that cannot be ignored, and it’s not any different than the Holocaust. The Holocaust is not a fun exercise. Some people are going to feel poorly about learning of those tragedies, and we’ve got to teach them.” Education about those histories, Hutchinson said, is key to preventing similar violence in the future.
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