Talk Business and Politics and Hendrix College have been conducting automated political polls since 2010 that have chronicled and quantified with solid precision the rapid and deep reddening of Arkansas.
It bears mentioning, then, that the latest TBP-Hendrix survey shows Asa Hutchinson’s approval rating up and Donald Trump’s significantly down. For the first time, the workmanlike governor is more popular in Arkansas than the caricature president.
The Arkansas survey took place April 4, before the Syrian bombing, which might have provided Trump with a seeming presidential success to shore up his declining numbers. But that’s not the case nationally, as reflected in a Washington Post-ABC News poll. That survey conducted over the weekend shows a narrow majority supporting the Syrian strike but no significant change in generally unfavorable views of Trump’s presidential performance.
Perhaps many people can separate, after all, a single action from the full political persona. Perhaps they consider those subjects objectively on their own terms. (See my column Tuesday, assailing people as unwilling or unable to do that.)
At any rate, Arkansas attitudes on April 4, in a sample of 552 respondents producing an error rate of 4.2 percent, came out this way:
• Trump’s job approval rating was 53 percent favorable and 39 percent unfavorable, a notable decline — some would say almost alarming — from a 60-35 rating in February. That’s down seven points on the favorable side and up four points on the unfavorable.
• Hutchinson’s job approval rating was 56 percent favorable and 32 percent unfavorable, a bit of an improvement from a 53-30 rating in February. His favorable was up four percentage points, and his unfavorable up two.
That might suggest that there is political currency remaining in Arkansas for center-leaning leadership of Hutchinson’s recent type — with “center” a relative term reflecting the extreme rightness of contemporary Arkansas politics.
Or it could be that Hutchinson benefits modestly from being seen as the adult in Little Rock trying to hold the line for responsibility and reason against an unpopular Legislature.
That’s because the poll found the Legislature’s approval-disapproval rating from the recently completed session to be 32 approving and 44 disapproving. It also found support by 53-38 for the fixes in that gun bill — fixes that disallowed concealed-carrying with enhanced training permits at college athletic events, UAMS and the State Hospital.
That is to say that Arkansas voters apparently can be discerning as well: They liked the NRA-supported legislation extending concealed-carry rights, but they also liked the follow-up bill carving Razorback games and a couple of other venues out of it.
Arkansans seem to be saying: Carrying guns is good, but not necessarily every danged place anybody goes.
The poll also shows potential peril for Hutchinson, or so it seems to me, in the imminent spree of seven executions in 10 days.
Respondents favor the death penalty by 61-29 over life without parole. That’s overwhelming, yes, but quite a bit less than the Arkansas approval numbers in the high 80s or even low 90s that I remember seeing in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But when asked how they felt about the state’s plan to kill eight, now seven, death row inmates in 10 days to use up a drug before its expiration date, the approval number dropped to 51 percent.
Unfavorable national attention — such as native John Grisham’s disapproving column in USA Today on Monday — could drive that number lower. And if something should go wrong in any of the seven deliveries of three-drug killing cocktails, which has happened, then the support level could reduce further.
It’s hard to imagine the imposition of the death penalty posing political risks in rapidly and deeply reddening Arkansas. It would be remarkable irony, for sure.
But it’s not out of the question.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.