Asa Hutchinson Suspends Republican Presidential Bid

Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who entered the presidential race as an outspoken critic of former President Donald J. Trump but never gained traction, suspended his bid for the Republican nomination on Tuesday.

“Today, I am suspending my campaign for president and driving back to Arkansas,” he said in a statement after finishing with less than 1 percent support in the Iowa caucuses on Monday. “My message of being a principled Republican with experience and telling the truth about the current front-runner did not sell in Iowa. I stand by the campaign I ran.”

Mr. Hutchinson, who announced his candidacy in April, frequently called on the former president to drop out of the presidential race over his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, to no avail.

“How in the world are you going to beat Donald Trump,” he said during an interview just days before the Iowa caucuses, “if somebody is not out there sounding the alarm that we can all go down in flames if we have the wrong nominee?”

He sought to brand himself as a voice of “consistent conservatism” in the race and has said he chose to run to give Republican voters a variety of non-Trump options.

But after squeaking into the first Republican National Committee debate in August, Mr. Hutchinson failed to make the rest of them, as candidates were required to clear increasingly heightened polling and fund-raising thresholds.