LITTLE ROCK — The voter turnout in Tuesday’s primaries makes Arkansas look like a two party state.
The number of Republican votes for president was only about 12,000 fewer than the number of Democratic votes for president.
Comparing the vote totals in comparable or near comparable races in other Arkansas primaries shows that Democratic votes outnumbered the Republican votes by about 187,000 two years ago, by 82,000 four years ago, and by 214,000 six years ago.
“I just think what we are seeing is a rising Republican presence in the state, and it is manifesting itself in voter participation in Republican primaries,” said Hal Bass, apolitical science professor at Ouachita Baptist College in Arkadelphia.
Older Arkansas readers may recall the days when election stories would say that winning the Democratic Party nomination was “tantamount to winning” the office sought.
“For a lot of voters, the game is now in the general election, not in the primaries,” said Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College in Conway. “Thirty years ago, the game was in the Democratic primary.”
Those were the days when Democrats could joke that the GOP was so small it could hold its party convention in a phone booth.
The change has been “a long time coming,” Bass said,“and we appear to be crossing a significant threshold.”
Widespread disapproval in Arkansas of America’s No. 1 Democrat, President Barack Obama, is part of the explanation for the trend toward the GOP, Bass said, but Obama is “kind of a short-time catalyst,” having been in office fewer than four years.
“I don’t think you can separate race from this discussion, but I think it is broader than race,” he said, referring to Obama, who is part black.
Other factors include many Arkansas voters’ distaste for the national Democratic Party and the “nationalization of the media culture,” making it more difficult for conservative Democrats to distance themselves from Democrats in more liberal places like Massachusetts, Bass said.
“What you are seeing here is an alignment of ideology and party as opposed to an era where they were not aligned,” he said. “That means that if you are a conservative, you are going to be a Republican.”
After the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, Republicans had little notable presence in Arkansas until 1966, when Arkansans elected Winthrop Rockefeller as governor and John Paul Hammerschmidt as a congressman.
Subsequent GOP notables were Ed Bethune as 2nd District congressman in 1978; Frank White as governor in 1980; Jay Dickey as 4th District congressman in 1992; and Mike Huckabee as lieutenant governor in 1993. Huckabee became governor in 1996 after Jim Guy Tucker resigned.
“In each one of those previous cases, the Democrats were able to rebound,” Bass said. “It just seems to me it may be different [now, but] it remains to be seen.”
In 2010, Arkansas Republicans repeatedly linked Democrats to Obama and won the offices of lieutenant governor, secretary of state and land commissioner, 15 positions in the 35-seat state Senate, 44 in the 100-seat House, and four of the state’s six congressional seats.
Barth said Huckabee’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 “helped enormously” in narrowing the state’s historic gap between Democratic and Republican voter turnout, before the gap temporarily widened in 2010.
Barth said a narrower gap between the parties’ turnouts “is probably going to be more the normal pattern” in the future.
“It clearly indicates growing Republicanism in the state,” Barth said.
“We saw vibrant party campaigns on both sides in the Legislature and Congress” in this year’s primary, said Barth, who ran as a Democrat for the state Senate in 2010, losing to another Democrat. “That is a clear and tangible sign of two-party competition in the state.”
Other factors contributing to the GOP’s rise in Arkansas include demographic changes with more upscale voters in Northwest Arkansas and in the suburbs surrounding Little Rock, and the generational replacement of older loyal Democrats with people ages 18-40 voting for Republicans, Barth said.
Candace Martin, a spokesman for the Democratic Party, said party officials are pleased that Democratic voters outnumbered Republican voters Tuesday.
“Even in the 4th Congressional District where the Republicans had their most high-profile primary race, there were more than 20,000 Democratic primary voters than Republican voters,” Martin said.
A spokesman for the state Republican Party, Katherine Vasilos, said the GOP turnout continues to rise, noting that the Democrats had one of the lowest turnouts in decades Tuesday because of a growing sentiment that the state Democratic Party no longer represents “the common sense conservative values of Arkansans.
“The Democratic Party of Arkansas is deflecting from the big picture because they don’t want to acknowledge that over the past 20 years they’ve lost hundreds of thousands of primary voters,” said Vasilos.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/27/2012