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Former Arkansas governor and current GOP presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson has become one of Donald Trump's fiercest critics. | Kathryn Gamble for POLITICO | | He’s anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-free trade, a former two-term Republican governor and congressman who played a major role in the impeachment of Democratic President Bill Clinton. He’s 72, but he can still manage a set of 50 pushups just fine — and that’s five years younger than the other guy, anyway. Not so long ago, Asa Hutchinson would have been a shoo-in for the debate stage. But as of yesterday, and with only two weeks left until the first GOP bout in Milwaukee, he had just 22,000 of the 40,000 donors required to claim his spot. Though he’d cleared the other two requirements — garnering 1 percent in three polls and 200 donors in 20 states — and remained optimistic, his path to the debate was unclear at best. How did someone straight out of Republican central casting end up in this position? “While policy-wise, he remains mostly in lockstep — as governor, he signed one of the country’s strictest abortion bans — he lacks the fire-breathing, troll-the-libs ethos that animates much of the modern GOP,” writes Ben Birnbaum in this week’s Friday Read. “More crucially, he broke with Trump after the 2020 election and has emerged as one of the former president’s leading Republican critics.” (He’s said that the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election should disqualify him from reclaiming the office, been booed at the Turning Point Action Conference, skewered by Tucker Carlson and called out by former President Donald Trump himself.) But Hutchinson hasn’t given up on making his way to the debate — or helping to loosen Trump’s grip on the party. And he’s basing his Hail-Mary campaign on the idea that classic conservatism can make a comeback. Read the story.
| | | |  | “Governor, I know you guys are obsessed with pronouns these days, but come November, yours are gonna be ‘has’ and ‘been.’” Can you guess who said this about Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
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POLITICO illustration/Photos by Getty Images, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts via AP | Please, Spare Us the Trump Judge Merch … Just a few days after Judge Tanya Chutkan was assigned to Trump’s Washington trial, Etsy vendors had already made her into merch. You can buy a “Judge Chutkan Fan Club” shirt — one of many options for Chutkan stans — for $19.97 plus shipping. The hawkers of the #resistance liberal market that gave us Ruth Bader Ginsburg candles and Anthony Fauci mugs have once again capitalized on the image of an accomplished jurist — and that only helps Trump’s case, writes Michael Schaffer in this week’s Capital City column. “On the most narrow level, Trump’s theory of his case is that it’s a partisan plot countenanced by a rigged judicial system. A progressive culture that makes a folk hero out of the prosecutor — much less the judge! — reinforces just that argument.”
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| Opponents of abortion rights took a big hit in Ohio’s special election on Tuesday — although the word “abortion” wasn’t actually on the ballot. Not sure what’s going on? These talking points will get you up to speed (from associate editor Dylon Jones): - Ohio voters weren’t voting on abortion directly; instead, they were deciding whether to make it harder for voters to directly amend the state constitution via ballot referendum by raising the threshold for passage from a simple majority to 60 percent. Voters rejected that plan, making the upcoming November referendum on legalizing abortion much more likely to pass — and sending anti-abortion conservatives scrambling to find a strategy that will sway voters to their side. - Expect some soul searching among your conservative colleagues, who face a stark choice between their conviction that only a total ban on abortion is acceptable and the electoral reality that such a divisive, polar position could kneecap them at the ballot box. As Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a top funder of this week’s referendum, said, “So long as the Republicans and their supporters take the ostrich strategy and bury their heads in the sand, they will lose again and again.” - As for proponents of abortion rights who are riding a high after this win, expect them to try and get abortion rights onto voters’ ballots in other states, such as Arizona, Florida and Missouri, where activists are pushing for votes before next year — “races anti-abortion groups are warning they will lose without more resources,” writes health care reporter Alice Ollstein. - How did all this ballot referendum stuff get started in the first place? Ohio joined other states in adopting the system back in 1912, when political progressives pushed it as a means of clawing power back from gerrymandered legislatures. In a now bygone sign of shared democratic values, both presidential candidates that year, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, backed the idea, and it was ratified with over 57 percent support — which just so happened to be the winning percentage of votes in Tuesday’s election.
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| |  Animation by Helen Ratner for POLITICO | D.C.’s Doug Cartel … Dougs are really having a moment in Washington. One Doug got a medal for going to space. Two Dougs have served as chairs of the Congressional Budget Office. This Doug was interviewed by special counsel Jack Smith; that Doug is the only second gentleman ever; one Doug is even running for president! And unlike the Jeffs or the Joes or the full 10 percent of senators who go by Jon or John, the Dougs share a bond that transcends politics. “A weird, niche community of them has formed ... born out of sharing a name neither rare nor common” and that often seems to get overshadowed, writes politics editor Sam Stein in this special report on a special name. “They tweet at each other, seek each other out at parties, and keep tabs on their collective achievements.” You could even say the fraternity is “a rare flash of bipartisanship in a town filled with acrimony.”
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| |  Illustration by Matt Chase for POLITICO | The Bipartisan Policy That’s Walloping Pornhub … If you try to access Pornhub in Utah, Mississippi or Virginia, you’ll find a (fully safe-for-work) video of porn star Cherie DeVille explaining that the site no longer operates in those states. That’s because of new legislation aimed at preventing minors from accessing adult websites by requiring users to upload their IDs to verify their age — prompting the online giant with more users than Amazon to shut down service. Four other states have passed nearly identical bills, and while Pornhub is hanging on in those states, it’s taken a huge dent in traffic; in Louisiana, it’s down 80 percent. “In just over a year, age-verification laws have become perhaps the most bipartisan policy in the country,” writes POLITICO Magazine intern Marc Novicoff, “and they are creating havoc in a porn industry that many had considered all but impossible to actually regulate.” Here’s the story behind them.
| | | **Who Dissed answer: That would be Beshear’s gubernatorial rival, Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who lobbed this grammatical head-scratcher of a line at the annual Fancy Farm Picnic, a Kentucky politics tradition at which political figures roast one another in front of a rowdy crowd of liberal and conservative hecklers. politicoweekend@email.politico.com | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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