These are hard and emotional times for Arkansas Democrats. They are fighting for their political lives.
They’re not going against the grain; they’re trying to climb against an avalanche, one by which utter disdain for Barack Obama crashes hard on top of their heads.
Arkansas Republicans tried for decades to build their party in Arkansas. And now Obama has done it for them in four years, from 2010 until now.
Yet Arkansas Democrats nobly trudge onward, which is not to say upward.
They always have Bill Clinton. But he’s getting a tad shop-worn, coming around weekly for the same visual presentation and message. A world statesman doing his politicking in a global context can’t quite preach fire and brimstone the way Clinton used to preach it against Frank White.
At this stage of life, Clinton on the Arkansas campaign trail is a rarefied figure trying to impose himself on a pedestrian game.
Beyond that, Clinton tends to remind independent voters that they liked him and the state of affairs when he was president, but that they certainly don’t like the guy in office now or the state of affairs currently.
A leading Arkansas Democrat told me over the phone the other day that the future of the Arkansas Democratic Party was … well, in my hands, he said.
He said that if if I kept writing that the Democrats were in big trouble, likely to lose, then it would sap the vital energy the party needs for its best shot, which is to drive an unprecedented midterm turnout of Democratic voters.
He said that a U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and a Gov. Asa Hutchinson would be my fault.
That’s absurd, of course. Don’t put that on me.
As an opinion journalist leaning a tad left, I tend to prefer Democrats usually. But I don’t serve Democrats. I serve readers with my honest and informed opinion, which in this case is that a political party is in a perilous condition indeed to rely on energy so fragile that a newspaperman could sap it with an honest and informed opinion.
Anyway, I have assailed Tom Cotton for months with a dedication and sincere intensity I’ve not felt or applied since Tommy Robinson similarly menaced the state.
And how’s that going? Not so good.
Cotton is now at 49 percent and ahead of Mark Pryor by 8.5 points in the latest poll by Talk Business and Politics in association with Hendrix College. And that’s with a little added weighting of black vote to reflect this vaunted Democratic turnout mania.
Alas, I sense a public perception of shrillness in the attacks on Cotton. I don’t know what truth is left to tell on the dangerous zealot. If you’re not properly terrified of him yet, I suspect you aren’t going to be.
Two things: One is that Talk Business and Hendrix have been on target in polling in recent Arkansas elections. They rely on massive samples comprising both landline and cellular calls. The second thing is math. If those percentages are correct, and assuming an uncommonly high midterm turnout of 900,000 voters, then Democrats would need to scare up an additional 76,000 unexpected voters to pull even with Cotton.
Maybe those votes are out there. Maybe I’ll be as surprised on election night as Karl Rove was when Ohio was projected for Obama. All it will take is the most remarkable political feat ever in a state known for remarkable political feats.
Independent voters—generally despising Obama—favor Cotton in the Talk Business/Hendrix poll by 2-to-1. More devastating to Democrats is that a gender gap by which Pryor previously enjoyed an advantage among women voters is now gone.
It doesn’t matter that Cotton is robotic, a cold fish and Koch puppet and extremist, or that he voted against women and farmers and disaster relief and Arkansas Children’s Hospital. It matters that people are high-peeved and want to vote for change—to end this oddly resented health-care reform (which is steadily working, especially in Arkansas) and stop these terrorists (who are steadily being bombed) and reduce this deficit (which is steadily being reduced) and get rid of any and all aiders and abettors of this president who supposedly let Ebola into the country to kill us all because he just isn’t … oh, you know, like us.
In two debates, Pryor outperformed Cotton, except for the horrid gaffe of making $200,000 a middle-class income. Most people didn’t watch. Those who watched were pre-determined to root for the candidate they were going to vote for regardless of any debating performance.
Pryor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mike Ross have been relying on the chronically cussed independence of Arkansas voters, who will confuse you with a mixed message every time.
So it turns out that Arkansas voters may send that mixed message not for Pryor and Ross, but elsewhere—in congressional races, where, according to the latest from Talk Business-Hendrix, Democratic candidate Patrick Henry Hays leads in the 2nd District and Democratic candidate James Lee Witt has pulled nearly even in the 4th District.
But Hays and Witt do not quite represent a future for the Arkansas Democratic Party. They are more accurately seen as rare Democratic survivors of the past.
For the Democratic future, I refer you to Clarke Tucker, the young lawyer being absolutely smeared by Republicans in his state representative’s race in Little Rock. It’s on account of his having represented on a pro bono basis in a single criminal hearing the brother of a friend of his mother. His momma asked him to help for free in one plea-bargained proceeding, on an adjudication agreed to by the prosecutor and judge, and now a seemingly desperate Stacy Hurst would have you believe Tucker is a criminal-coddler.
Tucker was invited to speak Sunday at the big Clinton rally in North Little Rock. And he said: “We can send a message in Arkansas this year that politics can still be noble, that we embrace hope over fear, and that we believe not only in the greatness of our people, but also in their inherent goodness.”
Sounds a little like an heir to the great Arkansas Democrats of the past, those in the sunset, doesn’t he?
Of course he probably ought to win at least one race before we bestow on him the mantle of the great Democratic hope.
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.