New polling suggests that Arkansas voters, while still generally trending Republican or conservatively independent, find themselves specifically cool to the two uninspiring Republicans atop the general election ballot.
Those would be:
• Shop-worn Asa Hutchinson, the presumptive gubernatorial candidate running statewide in his fourth decade, winless in the first three.
• The oddly extreme Tom Cotton, the U.S. Senate candidate who votes like Ted Cruz—for shutting down the government, against paying national debt and for inviting global economic collapse—and is as personally aloof as he is resume-rich with the Harvard and warrior history.
Arkansas voters seem to emphasize conservatism in the abstract. They seem to emphasize independence in bitter reality when they get a load of those two.
Honest to goodness: If you have anti-Obama and anti-Obamacare all on your side in Arkansas right now, and if you are stuck at 41 percent to 43 percent in a state where the president’s disapproval rating exceeds 60 percent, then you need to look long and hard into a mirror.
Asa’s people seem aware. They have unveiled a TV ad in which Hutchinson lets his wife do all the talking.
Likewise, Cotton’s best moment was back around Christmas when he stayed off camera and let his momma talk.
Here are the polling numbers to which I refer:
Roby Brock’s local Talk Business and Politics, in partnership with Hendrix College, has a new installment of its demonstrably credible poll, a combination of hundreds of computer calls including a sampling of cellular devices.
In the governor’s race, the poll shows Democrat Mike Ross and Hutchinson essentially in a dead heat, with Ross at 44 and Hutchinson at 43. That is after Chris Christie’s Republican Governors Association poured hundreds of thousands into the state to say “Obama, Pelosi, Ross” over and over and over again.
That doesn’t mean Ross is going to win. It means Hutchinson is stuck. It means his campaign theme—that Arkansas is now so Republican it finally will elect even him—is in question.
And it puts the laughable big lie to a poll his campaign was touting a couple of weeks ago showing him ahead by 8 points. It turned out the firm doing that poll has a history of producing good Republican numbers that don’t hold up when people actually, you know, vote.
Meantime, Talk Business and Politics polled the Senate race and put the ever-embattled Democrat, Mark Pryor, laden with his vote for Obamacare, ahead of Cotton by 45.5 to 42.5.
That’s after Wanda and Jerry have bellyached ad nauseum about Pryor in Koch commercials.
Actually, it was the second consecutive poll to show a Pryor lead. A couple of weeks ago, a national pollster surveying the state for the fracking industry showed Pryor ahead by three points.
More remarkably, that poll showed a generic Republican leading Pryor, but a specific one named Tom Cotton trailing Pryor.
Now what does that tell you?
It tells you a cardboard cutout runs better than Cotton.
It tells you Cotton’s odd and aloof extremism is seeping through to Arkansas voters and sticking him in a ditch across the road from where Asa is stuck in the ditch.
It doesn’t mean Cotton is going to lose. It means his theme—that Arkansas is now so Republican it will elect even him—is in question.
What it means to Democrats is energy. They have been reeling emotionally from the touted Nate Silver’s recent assessment of a 70 percent chance of a Cotton victory. Silver may need to recalculate. Not 70. Closer to 50.
Republican chatter a couple of weeks ago was that Cotton was building his lead and that the national Democratic Party and its dark-money super-PACs might become so concerned about saving other seats—especially Jeanne Shaheen’s in New Hampshire with the new challenge of Scott Brown—that they’d abandon Pryor.
Not now. A three-point lead in an Obama-hating Southern state, with control of the Senate perhaps hanging in the balance … well, Democratic money is going to pour in here like crude oil through Mayflower.
And, not to be outdone, Koch brothers’ money for Cotton is going to leak like crude oil into a Lake Conway cove, threatening the natural habitat.
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.