“Interesting stat from this morning … Asa Hutchinson was +8 internally in July and +8 now. Ross spent $700k and didn’t move. Bad sign.”-A posting Friday afternoon on Twitter from Terry Benham, a Republican political consultant in Little Rock.
The substance of that post is pointless.
Democrats say they have an internal poll showing Pat Hays pulverizing Tim Griffin. I don’t buy that any more than I accept this assertion that Asa Hutchinson has an internal poll by which he is up by eight points over Mike Ross in the governor’s race.
Other transparent, external and independent polls, like one by Talk Business, suggest he leads, but by half that.
The point is the tweet’s simple existence, referencing as it does a pro-Hutchinson, anti-Ross discussion at a presumed meeting of Asa devotees with the candidate Friday morning at the Capital Hotel. I had heard about this confab, but couldn’t quite get anyone to confirm it outright.
I did send Asa a message asking how his meeting went and he replied that life was good.
The telling thing is that Hutchinson, reeling among insiders because Democrat Ross has raised a record $3 million in six months while Hutchinson has raised a million in nine, would find it advisable, perhaps even necessary, to call in donors to reassure them that everything is under control.
Republicans are within inches of full control of Arkansas. They don’t want to blow it with the lethargy of a shop-worn candidate taking a shot only because of his seniority.
This much I can tell you for sure: Some Republican insiders have despaired that Hutchinson has raised funds anemically while Ross has raised them robustly. And others have lamented that Hutchinson has kept a low public profile except to propose only a slow and incremental process toward reducing state income-tax rates.
There has been insider GOP talk of trying to pump life into Hutchinson, of designing bolder conservative positions for him, even of some other Republican gubernatorial standard-bearer for the epic race of 2014. But Asa’s the guy. You couldn’t beat him in Northwest Arkansas in a Republican primary. You can’t beat his statewide name identification, earned the hard way by losing three statewide races.
And you can’t beat his resume: U.S. attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, U.S. congressman, top national drug enforcement official, second in command of Homeland Security, presenter of the prosecution at the impeachment of Bill Clinton and pitchman for the National Rifle Association’s campaign for more guns at school.
He’s done everything except display a recently discernible pulse, which is what he apparently gathered his donors to correct.
Dubiously asserted poll margins aside, Hutchinson’s central point is true enough. Whatever that margin in July-and I’m going with four points instead of eight-it’s probably the same now even after Ross raised $3 million and spent $700,000.
Numbers only get moved any more-tragically-by identification-building and message-driving and opponent-blasting, all via television advertising. We’re not to that season yet, except in the crazed U.S. Senate battle between Mark Pryor and Tom Cotton into which unregulated national money is being gushed obscenely.
The point is that, at this moment, Ross stands to buy a lot more of those ads when the time comes, and thus take a more vigorous shot at moving the numbers than Hutchinson.
As I understand, Hutchinson also told his donors not to fret because Ross, when in Congress in 2010, voted to let Obamacare out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Hutchinson believes Arkansas voters will not abide that unpardonable sinonce it is made clear to them by whatever frequency of advertising he can afford when the time comes.
Basically Hutchinson seems to be relying on a climate so toxic for Democrats in Arkansas that, finally, even he can win.
There is a certain citation that Asa’s devotees positively treasure. I predict you will hear it in the autumn of 2014.
This is it: “The truth is that Ross and his pals among Blue Dogs, by having enough votes on Energy and Commerce to hold up the [health reform] bill and demand changes in the first place, had enough votes to kill it outright. Instead, in the end, they did [Nancy] Pelosi’s bidding, as they always will do at crunch time, and let her have the bill on the floor of the House.”
Who said that? Apparently it was written in 2010 by some occasionally left-inclined columnist whom Republicans never believed on anything else.
“Thanks for that,” Ross said to me ironically and sardonically when I had coffee with him weeks ago.
Ross’ response is that he worked in the committee to make the bill better for small business and Arkansas rural hospitals because that’s the process and that was his job. It’s that he voted against an entirely different final bill that came back as put together by Harry Reid and amended by the Senate.
Anyway, the governor’s race is about more than that, he says.
That’s too many words of explanation, Republicans say.
But Ross can afford more words right now.
So this is going to be a good one. One key question is whether Arkansas has plummeted so deeply into anti-Obamaism that Asa doesn’t need as much money as the other side, or all that much of a pulse, or a natural ease of engagement that seems to evade him.
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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 10/29/2013