By Steve Brawner, © 2023 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Can Gov. Asa Hutchinson get elected president in 2024? He’s asking Arkansans to donate a dollar to give him a chance.

Hutchinson is trying to qualify for the first Republican Party presidential debate Aug. 23. To do so, he must reach at least 1% in the polls, which he is doing in some of them.

He also must have 40,000 unique donors of any amount, of which he is still short. In fact, he told the KARK-TV “Capitol View” news program Aug. 2 that he was nearing being halfway there. That was more than two weeks ago, so he’s made up more ground since then. It was an improvement over where he had been a month earlier, when he had 5,000. He said his numbers had increased by 10,000 in the previous 10 days.

Campaigns often are a game of “survive and advance,” and Hutchinson has determined that getting on that debate stage is the next step to survival. That’s a big reason why he did a 10-minute interview on a Little Rock TV station. Instead of using that time to dial for big dollars or shake hands in Iowa and New Hampshire, he asked the home folks to donate as little as $1 at his campaign website, www.asa2024.com. A dollar each is all he needs. 

As a journalist, I’m hesitant to donate to political campaigns and have only done it a few times in my 54 years. I probably wasn’t working as a journalist when I did. Plus I’m cheap.

But I did take up Hutchinson on his request for three reasons. One is that he asked. Two is that for eight years when he was governor, he treated reporters with respect. He was open to the press and allowed us to ask questions about a range of subjects. After a speech, he usually made a point to stop by and talk to us.

The other reason I donated to his campaign is I want him to have a chance to win. He is conservative but also pragmatic. He’s a Reagan Republican who believes in restrained government and a restrained style of politics. He’s respectful of others and of the democratic process. He’s serious and policy oriented. He’s sober minded and drama free. He doesn’t see politics as an us-versus-them, zero-sum game.

Looking at the whole package, he is the type of Republican I wish the Republican Party was more like, just as former Gov. Mike Beebe is the kind of Democrat I wish the Democratic Party was more like. But like I said earlier, I’m 54.

If there’s any irony in my donating a dollar to get Hutchinson on the debate stage, it’s that I think he made a mistake by prioritizing it. 

Again, I’m just a journalist and not a political professional – nor am I former governor, member of Congress, former undersecretary in the Department of Homeland Security, and former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

All that said, after observing him for many years, I can tell you that he is not very good at this kind of performative theater. I don’t expect him to land any zingers that will go viral on social media. It’s just not his style. Instead, the debate stage will be dominated by louder, more boisterous actors who are better at the reality TV show that politics has become.

Instead, he should have gone all-in on his campaign rationale of being the non-Donald Trump candidate. When the Republican National Committee said it would make all debate participants sign a pledge to support the eventual nominee, I think he should have declared he would not do so if it meant supporting Trump. 

He would have been the outsider candidate making a principled stand. It would have gotten him some media attention and turned the heads of a lot of rich anti-Trump Republicans. When criticized about it, he could have argued that he was only doing what Trump did in the 2016 campaign, when he refused to say he would support the Republican nominee if it weren’t him, and what he is doing this campaign as well.

It’s too late for him to try that strategy, and maybe it would have been the wrong one. At this point, he really needs to get on that debate stage. To do that, he needs 40,000 donors donating $1 each more than he needs one donor to donate $4 million. Again, the website is www.asa2024.com.

We’ll see if he can find them, in Arkansas and elsewhere.

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 13 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.