Asa Hutchinson far behind on donors needed to make RNC debate stage
Mabinty Quarshie
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Republican presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is in danger of not making the GOP’s 2024 debate stage in August after revealing he does not have the required number of donors.
“I’ll be very straightforward with you — I’m not there yet,” Hutchinson said on Hugh Hewitt‘s radio show on Thursday.
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Hewitt pressed the former governor on where he stood in terms of meeting the Republican National Committee‘s donor threshold, to which Hutchinson responded: “We’re about 5,000. So we got, again, more work to do. We’ve got time to do it.”
RNC rules require all GOP presidential campaigns to have a minimum of 40,000 donors for their candidate to qualify for the Aug. 23 debate in Milwaukee. Of those, the RNC requires at least 200 unique donors from 20-plus states and/or territories.
“This bothers me that the RNC has set this artificial line that you’ve got to cross in order to qualify for the debate. We ought to be more expansive than that rather than restrictive,” Hutchinson added.
He declined to reveal to Hewitt the amount of money he raised in the Federal Election Commission’s second quarter.
“We had a good quarter. I’m not competitive with, you know, Donald Trump,” he said. “So, that’s our focus right now. It’s not necessarily large donors. We need small donors in order to get on that debate stage.”
Trump, meanwhile, has raised more than $35 million during the second quarter and continues to be the front-runner in the 2024 primary.
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Yet Hutchinson reiterated he would not pledge to support the former president if he becomes the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee. “I don’t expect to support Donald Trump,” Hutchinson told Hewitt.
“I do not believe he is the right one to lead our country, and we’re gonna have a massive loss if he is the nominee,” he added.