Gov. Asa Hutchinson is sounding more and more like a candidate for president.
He's certainly keeping his options open as he steps up efforts to define himself as a Republican Party alternative in 2024, one anxious to move the party away from the influences of former President Donald Trump.
Right now, his focus is on next year's midterm elections.
"If Trump is the issue in 2022, we lose," Hutchinson said bluntly in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
"He's not on the ballot and we have to be the party of ideas and principles that are relevant to what's happening in our country today. We can't be revisiting what happened last election and we can't relitigate that," Hutchinson said.
The interview came last week as Hutchinson prepares to move into the chairmanship of the National Governors Association.
It's not that he's been invisible as the association's vice chair, but his ascension will mean just that many more opportunities to raise his national profile.
The Arkansas governor, like predecessors Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee, both of whom chaired the national association, will undoubtedly be featured in even more guest appearances on national news shows than now.
He's a frequent guest already on the Sunday talk shows, often related to the state's efforts against covid-19, but his actions as governor also draw other attention nationally, as did his recent decision to dispatch Arkansas National Guard members to the Texas border with Mexico.
He was in the national spotlight, too, when he vetoed Arkansas legislation targeting medical treatment of transgender youths in the state. The Legislature overrode his veto and passed the bill anyway, but Hutchinson got to explain why he vetoed it to a national audience.
The frequency of such appearances reflects his willingness to do them. Chances are that his most recent quote about Trump will trigger more bookings.
For the record, what the governor said is much the same thing as he has said before.
Back in January, after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, he told a Fox News audience that the Republican Party must emphasize conservative principles, not individual personalities.
Republicans will debate the direction of the party as well as "Trump's influence over it," he said then.
Republicans were fractured by Trump's handling of his defeat, including the challenge to the Electoral College vote, "but our party will come back together," the governor said.
He predicted, "We're going to have a tough six months or more coming up. We're going to have a lot of soul searching that's going to be done."
Six months later, the soul searching continues within his party.
It is all the more apparent that Hutchinson, who is in the last years of his second and final term as Arkansas' governor, intends to be a significant part of it.
He has started a political action committee he said will help Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm election.
And he still wants a policy debate to get back to the conservative principles of the party he helped build in Arkansas and move away from the personality-driven approach that spawned Trumpism.
Hutchinson is not alone in the pursuit. Others are positioning themselves, too, to be the Republican Party's standard-bearer in 2024.
Some of them will choose much the same path Hutchinson seems to be marking. Others -- perhaps including the former president himself -- will carry the Trump banner.
They will use it to beat the traditionalists over the head, as did one of Hutchinson's critics.
Trent Garner, a Republican state senator from El Dorado, called the governor "a relic of the past," as Garner asserted that "Trump and Trumpism is the bold new future of the Arkansas Republican Party."
State voters did give Trump a huge win margin (62.4 percent) in 2020, which was even higher than he had gotten four years earlier (60.6 percent) when he won the presidency.
The question now is how many Arkansans regret those votes.
Or, for presidential aspirants, including Hutchinson, how many American voters have finally had enough of Trumpism?