Asa Hutchinson on staying in the race and the Republican party: ‘We’re in trouble’

Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP

Asa Hutchinson spent Friday night at a rodeo in Des Moines, watching cowboys ride broncos while holding on for dear life. “You have to only hold on to the horse with one hand and so you’ve always got to be keeping the other hand up, and you’ve got to do that for eight seconds with that bronco bucking like crazy,” Hutchinson explains. “One of them decided to preserve themselves and so grabbed hold with two hands. They’re disqualified.”

America in the Donald Trump years can feel like a wild horse trying to throw off its rider but Hutchinson is still clinging on with one hand. He has made around 60 trips to a hundred cities in Iowa over the past year in a long shot bid for the White House. He has embarked on a solemn crusade against Trump in a state where the former president retains a cult-like following.

But he enjoys one advantage over his nemesis: whereas Trump has set impossibly high expectations for Monday’s Iowa caucuses, Hutchinson’s performance will disappoint no one: his support stands at 1% in the final NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll. Jonathan Capehart, a host on the MSNBC network, admitted on Saturday: “I’d forgotten that Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, is still in the race.”

If life is tough at the top, it can also be hard at the bottom. Over a lunch of chicken and a waffle with syrup at a restaurant in snowy dowtown Des Moines, Hutchinson recalls his struggle earlier that morning for votes in the Iowa caucuses, which require people to show up in person – no absentee voting is allowed.

“Somebody said, this lady here is about ready to support you but she has a few questions. So I call her up, spend 25 minutes answering very detailed questions on how I’m going to constrain the growth of federal government and on and on and on, even covering abortion issues and so on. And at the end of it, she says she’s about to get in the car to go to Florida. I said, you mean you’re not going to be in the caucus next week? And she said, no, but I’ll vote for you in November!”

They don’t make Republicans like Hutchinson any more. Last year the Politico website called him “the most normal Republican presidential candidate”. He calls himself a “Ronald Reagan conservative”, appointed by Reagan as the youngest US attorney in the country at the time at the age of 31. He served in Congress and was head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the George W Bush administration. Like Bill Clinton, he had two terms as governor of Arkansas.

Now 73, Hutchinson launched his White House bid in April in his hometown of Bentonville, pledging to reform federal law enforcement agencies and “bring out the best of America”. He also called on Trump, who had just been indicted by a grand jury in New York over hush money payments, to drop out of the race, contending that the office is more important than any individual.

“I believe in traditional conservative principles and Donald Trump has tried to reshape our party into an ego-driven machine that I don’t think reflects well in our country or our party,” he says.

In some ways Hutchinson’s past election campaigns in Arkansas, another agricultural state with a similar sized population, were good preparation for Iowa. He has smaller resources than any other candidate but leanness has an upside: fewer cost overheads and fewer bills to pay. As of last September, he had spent less than $1m.

“What has been helpful to us is that we didn’t build a Boeing 737 aircraft to campaign on,” he says cheerfully. “We built a Cessna and so it takes a lot less money to keep the Cessna in the air than it does the Boeing.”

Donald Trump has tried to reshape our party into an ego-driven machine that I don’t think reflects well in our country or our party

Despite the metaphor, Hutchinson has often taken long road trips while rival candidates are flying, sometimes in his own car or the cheapest rental available. The New York Times newspaper noted that once, when his flight from Chicago to Des Moines was cancelled, Hutchinson pooled his money with three strangers to rent a car and drove to Iowa for his campaign stops. Glamorous it isn’t.

“If you’re a well-funded campaign you’re going to have advanced teams and support but, if you don’t have mega-donors behind you, you’re driving with volunteers or campaign staff three hours to a city in northern Iowa, making calls as you go to donors across the country, making sure that you can keep a campaign going.

“You get there and you might have a small crowd. You might be at a Pizza Ranch and you make your case and you take names and you build your organisation one step at a time.”

Still, like others before him, Hutchinson found that Iowans take their first-in-the-nation responsibility serious and ask detailed questions about border security and other issues. “I spoke to a group of law students and one of the questions was, what’s your position on the Jones Act? I hadn’t thought about the Jones Act since I was in law school and I’m not sure I thought about it then because I didn’t study maritime law.”

There are also differences from state to state. “Here in Iowa, you don’t get asked about climate change and, if you do it is, ‘You don’t really believe in that, do you?’ But in New Hampshire you campaign and they’re very serious about it and you’ve got to pay attention to the consistency of your answers.”

If history does remember Hutchinson’s quixotic campaign, it will be for what he didn’t do one night in August in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the first Republican primary debate – the only one for which Hutchinson qualified – moderator Bret Baier asked the eight candidates if they would still support Trump if he is convicted in any of the four criminal cases against him but still nominated.

The hands of Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley and Doug Burgum rose in unison. Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence appeared to hesitate but then did likewise. Chris Christie made a strange gesture and claimed that he was wagging his finger. Hutchinson alone kept his hand firmly at his side.

What did that moment tell him about the Republican party? “We’re in trouble and it’s actually gotten worse since then. I’m the only candidate in the race that hasn’t promised a pardon to Donald Trump and that’s so fundamental: you don’t promise pardons in the middle of a political campaign.

“Secondly, it undermines our justice system where a jury’s going to determine this and for pardons to be out there in the middle of a debate diminishes the importance of what’s happening in the courtroom.”

Taking such a stand, Hutchinson could be forgiven for feeling lonely. But he says: “It was lonely when I was about the only Republican in Arkansas. It’s a red state now but when I finished law school, I was told if you’re going to have any career in the law as a judge or a prosecutor, you’d better be a Democrat.

“It was a totally blue state – Clinton was the governor – and I fought a very lonely battle building a Republican party in Arkansas and we were successful at that. I’m used to fighting battles that are uphill but important and I see this the same way.”

Hutchinson voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but could not stomach the election lies that came in the build-up to and immediately after the incumbent president’s defeat by Joe Biden. “When I saw his refusal to acknowledge the election, but also even the refusal to go to the inauguration, that was un-American to me.

“It’s not leadership. I made sure I was there at that inaugural just to showcase the peaceful transfer of power is important and the fact that, even as Republicans, we want the best for America.”

Like many, Hutchinson assumed that Trump was washed up after the January 6 insurrection as senior Republicans including Kevin McCarthy finally appeared to break from him. “But then shortly after those clear statements of rebuke and holding him accountable and indicating he’s finished then all of a sudden you see them running down to Mar-a-Lago and empowering him again and so that was almost as a tragic day as January 6. They went down there and kissed the ring.”

Since then Trump and his allies have spent three years rewriting the history of January 6. Republicans filibustered the creation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate it and dismissed a congressional committee as a partisan exercise. When Trump was indicted over his part in the insurrection, Republicans bought into his claim of a “weaponised” justice system. He has recently taken to describing rioters who were prosecuted and imprisoned as “hostages”.

Hutchinson reflects: “It’s shocking and troubling because this is not something we have to wonder about what happened. We all saw it with our own eyes. It was an attack on police. It was an attack on the rule of law and it was an attack on the Congress.

“There’s no doubt what that was and it was not a patriotic act and for Donald Trump to put forth that lie is dismaying, but it’s even more troubling that so many are buying into that language. Whenever I think of hostages, I think of our American citizens and other world citizens that are hostages right now in the tunnels in Palestine by Hamas. What happened that day was not patriotic and those people who did it are not hostages.”

As former congresswoman Liz Cheney and others have discovered, such expressions of dissent are regarded as heresy in the Make America great again universe. But on the campaign trail in Iowa, Hutchinson’s conversations with Trump supporters were cordial.

He found that they compare the ex-president’s economy favourably with Biden’s and regard him as the unfairly treated victim of a politically biased establishment. But they also expressed concern about his legal woes and whether he can win a general election.

“Many of them said, ‘Yeah, I’m for Trump, I know he’s got real problems but I like his policies, I just wish he’d keep his mouth shut.’ You hear that a lot and that reflects to me some very weak support for Trump, that he’s sort of in a default position as an incumbent but if someone else surfaces that can convince them they’ve got the right policy direction for the country and is not chaotic, then those votes can be changed.”

Hutchinson adds: “You’ve got Trump at 50%. There’s a question as to whether he’s going to meet those expectations on Monday night and then, secondly, you’ve got probably half of those that are subject to change as you go into this year.”

Burgum, Scott, Pence and other candidates have come and gone before Iowa. Even Christie, more pugilistic in his anti-Trump mission, bowed out this week. Yet Hutchinson dutifully marches on. What will count as a good result on Monday, predicted to be the coldest caucus day ever?

“You’ve just got to beat expectations. A lot of people have counted us out and so if we can exceed those expectations that should be a storyline. We’ll just have to measure wherever we finish here and see whether we’ve got a sufficient boost to create more momentum for New Hampshire and further down the line.

“It’s important, particularly when the number of voices out there is diminished, that there’s someone that speaks clearly who’s in the race because this year is very unpredictable.”