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

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