All about the narrative

Jay Barth, the political science professor at Hendrix College, wrote an insightful column in the Arkansas Times last week.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

He related that recent studies in the neuroscience field indicate that voters decide with their hearts more than brains.

It seems to be so. Voters will act against their own best interest if they take a brighter personal shine to the candidate actually more averse to their best interest.

Personal judgment is easier and more powerful than policy command.

Campaigns are about a positive thing--personal connection or comfort--and a negative thing--fear, as in which of the candidates scares you most.

A Democratic partisan, Barth adjudged that his favored candidate for governor, Mike Ross, was making worthy plays for brains, but, alas, none as yet for the heart.

Ross has outraised Asa Hutchinson by 5-to-3. He indeed has a sound plan for pre-K education. He indeed has a vast long-term tax-reform plan. He is on the popular side of the minimum-wage issue. He forcefully embraces the private option.

On basic campaign mechanics and the substance of issues, Ross ought to be routing Republican Asa Hutchinson.

But he isn't routing anybody.


Barth noted the contrast: By this time eight years ago, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mike Beebe had used his paid media campaign to tell his story. He was a fatherless kid from a tar-paper shack who had made something of himself and wanted to help poor folks on their minimum wage and their grocery taxes.

An effective media campaign is an engaging ongoing narrative--the saucy young AT&T woman offering ever-disarmingly good deals to a procession of weird customers; Steve Landers enduring the high jinks of those rascally boys of his; Asa Hutchinson turning himself into a late-blooming nice guy, chastened by rejection, friend to the farmer and "Pawpaw" to a precocious granddaughter who built her own app and has inspired him to champion enhanced computer instruction in our public schools.

Yes, the Arkansas political heart is at risk of being stolen by the three-time loser of statewide races. Voters may be forgetting that they never liked Asa.

He stands in pretty grain fields and says he's going to help the farmers.

Then he campaigns in the Delta, where he's never run well, attending a black church on Sunday and the Blytheville Chamber of Commerce on Monday.

I tend to think Asa is using the Beebe campaign against him in 2006 as his template. Politicians who get beat tend to rerun that race.

Ross would seem to qualify as Beebe's natural heir. But Hutchinson is insinuating himself as Beebe's narrative heir.

The other night I saw the Hutchinson granddaughter ad, then, instantly, an angry Tom Cotton attack ad against Mark Pryor. And there it was--the reason Asa leads and Cotton languishes in a tie.

Why does Asa lead among women while Cotton trails? Seeming niceness, that's why.

The stark contrast in mood of those back-to-back ads, that's why.

For that matter, why is Pryor hanging around tied with Cotton? His niceness, that's why. His dad's legacy of niceness, that's why.

It helps Hutchinson that the Republican Governors Association is doing his dirty work. It has lathered big dollars in the state to attack Ross--laughably, of course, but perhaps effectively, as Nancy Pelosi's supposed go-to guy.

Hutchinson leads by five points in the latest credible polls. He's making plays on normal Democratic turf.

And some lobbyists with old Democratic ties are starting to talk more politely about him, as if they have begun to assess the landscape for the next four to eight years.

Meanwhile, partisan Democrats are assailing me and begging me to stop talking this way.

This is the last best chance for a Democratic governor in their lifetimes, they say. Don't be defeatist, they implore. Please understand, they say, that the Democrats' coordinated campaign is going to turn out the vote, aided significantly by the proposed initiated act to raise the minimum wage, which Ross supports and Hutchinson opposes.

I understand. Ross is keeping his powder dry, gearing up for a last-month advertising sprint. That advertising, I suspect, will encompass spots about his personal narrative--good ol' Prescott boy shooting skeet and honoring his schoolteacher parents.

Just know this: It's always been about a narrative--Rockefeller reforming the machine, Bumpers from nowhere with charisma and progressivism, Clinton having learned you can't lead without listening and Beebe coming up out of that tar-paper shack to cut your grocery bill.

The prevailing narrative right now: Republicans are taking over generally and Asa seems nicer than he used to be.

Please let the Democrats have another governor before they die--that may not be a winning narrative.

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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 on 08/21/2014

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