Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson has thrown his hat into the ring for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination -- and a panel of political experts can see no sense in his decision.
The New York Times convened a group of columnists, reporters and political operatives to assess Hutchinson's chances of beating Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis -- the two early frontrunners -- for the GOP nomination, and they agreed he faced a steep climb in a party that's dominated by the former president and his MAGA allies.
"On Earth Two, where Donald Trump never entered American politics, a two-term conservative governor from the South like Asa Hutchinson would be considered a serious candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination," said Matthew Continetti , a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "But where we live, and in Trump’s G.O.P., Hutchinson is a long shot."
Hutchinson might appeal to anti-Trump establishment conservatives after calling on the former president to withdraw from the race, but one expert offered a couple of dismal comparisons.
"Asa Hutchinson probably hopes to be taken as seriously as John Kasich was in 2016," said Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. "But he’ll be lucky if he has even as much impact as his fellow Arkansan Mike Huckabee had that year, which was virtually none."
The panelists agreed there just wasn't much of a lane for Hutchinson's brand of conservatism anymore.
"He is, as advertised, a 'consistent conservative' — pro-God, pro-gun, pro-business, anti-abortion rights, anti-big government — aggressively looking to remind Republicans that there is an alternative to the middle-finger nastiness of Trumpism," said Michelle Cottle, a member of the Times editorial board. "Which is also why his candidacy feels deader than disco. Who is his target audience?"
