Asa Hutchinson Promises To Be A Drama-Free President. Is That What GOP Voters Want? – By Monica Potts (FiveThirtyEight) / April 27, 2023
Asa Hutchinson has a vision for the future of the presidency … and he’s in it. The former governor of Arkansas kicked off his campaign for the Republican nomination for 2024 at a rally in Bentonville, Arkansas, yesterday, after months of public statements about the need for a kinder, gentler sort of commander in chief. “The Presidency is not and should not be an office of vengeance or retribution,” he said on Twitter on March 8. “Instead, it should be an office of consistent and unwavering leadership.”
This is in direct contrast with what he’s called the “chaos” of the years under former President Trump. Hutchinson is pitching himself as a sort of anti-Trump: an experienced politician with a conservative demeanor to match his ideology, who doesn’t need a Congress full of followers to get things done.
The timing could be right for that strategy. At least some Republican voters are looking for a Trump alternative, and the man previously crowned “Trump without the nonsense,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, ended up creating plenty of his own chaos and is now slipping in the polls. But Hutchinson is currently at the bottom of nearly every early primary poll — his favorability rating was underwater by 7 percentage points and most voters had either never heard of him or had no opinion of him in a Harris Poll/Harvard CAPS survey from April 18-19. Plus, early polls still show Trump is a favorite to win the nomination. Hutchinson can promise voters a president who’s born to be mild, but is that what they want?
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