FAYETTEVILLE -- The new leader of the Democrats in the state House wants converts, but he won't turn away allies if that's what it takes to be effective.
Rep. David Whitaker, D-Fayetteville, leads a delegation that is outnumbered three to one. With 24 members of a 100-member body, Democrats in the House cannot stop a budget bill requiring a three-quarters vote by themselves.
Whitaker detailed his plans to cope with these long odds. The first step is to increase the size of the delegation at every opportunity, he said. Recruiting candidates is already a top priority even though the next election is a year and five months away.
Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College in Conway and author of the latest update of the book Arkansas Politics and Government, said Democrats must be able to win legislative seats in growing Northwest Arkansas outside of the liberal stronghold of Fayetteville.
Whitaker said another important step for Democrats will be to find common ground with different subsets of Republicans on different issues.
"We never would have stopped school vouchers in this last session without rural Republicans," Whitaker said.
Vouchers and other such programs would allow any public school student to attend the school of his family's choice, including a private school, and take his share of school funding with him.
"Those rural Republicans listened to their school superintendents, who told them that rural Arkansas would get nothing from those bills," he said.
Making a pragmatic alliance required coordination, understanding and agreement between representatives with very different constituencies to represent, Whitaker said. Most of the Democrats in the House come from the state's larger cities.
"That kind of sitting down over coffee with people who aren't in our caucus and stopping bad bills is the kind of soft power we're getting used to using," he said. "Deals were made. We didn't ever surrender our principles, but we did let bills go through the Judiciary Committee, for instance, that were not harmful that we would have thrown up our hands about if we had the luxury of a knee-jerk reaction."
Whitaker is doing much of what he would be doing if they traded places, said Rep. Mathew Pitsch R-Fort Smith, the House majority leader.
"One of the things helping him is that we really are rated as one of the least partisan of the 50 states by the organizations that track such things," he said. The partisan divide is not as bitter here as it is in other states, he said.
"If I were him, and this sounds almost simplistic, I'd focus on the quality of legislation," Pitsch said. "I'd get together with his delegation and get some good legislation that 51 of his friends could support."
There are other issues ripe for agreement with other GOP sub-groups, Whitaker said.
"One issue that matters greatly to rural lawmakers is the opioid epidemic, which is far worse in rural areas than anyone has admitted," he said. "There are solutions being tried in Kentucky that could work here, and Democrats could support that."
Another issue would be a state earned income tax credit, which amounts to granting a larger tax refund to low-income families, beyond the usual deductions. That has support among rural lawmakers, he said.
A special commission appointed to make recommendations to revise the state's tax code will take a hard look at sales tax exemptions, among other issues. Many of the exemptions are for farm materials and supplies. Farming is central to rural economies. "They include exemptions on everything from wrapping for bales to the utilities paid on the farm," Whitaker said.
Whitaker is taking on a tough job, said Rep. Greg Leding, also D-Fayetteville, who held the minority leader position from 2013 to 2014. "I can't imagine doing that job now," Leding said.
"I had the advantage of being minority leader when it was almost a 50-50 split" between Republicans and Democrats, he said. "We helped elect the speaker, too, and had a strong and popular Democratic governor."
Democrats cast the decisive vote in the race for House speaker between two rival GOP candidates. Being minority leader under those more-favorable circumstances was still an exhausting and frustrating job, Leding said. Any major piece of legislation moving through the chamber demands all your attention.
"You can't even speak just for your own district," he said. "If you're the leader, it is assumed that any time you speak, you are speaking for the whole party."
There were 49 Democrats, including a Democratic-aligned independent, when the regular legislative session began in 2013. That number fell to 36 after the 2014 elections and to 24 after 2016 voting and some party defections during the 2017 legislative session.
Barth said Northwest Arkansas' Whitaker is well placed to recruit new House candidates in a part of the state vital to his party's future. The region is the fastest-growing in the state, according to recent U.S. Census data. The local metropolitan statistical area, which takes in Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville, grew 2.3 percent between 2015 and 2016, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
The Northwest region's rate of growth is twice that of the next-fastest growing region in the state, the northeast region centered around Jonesboro, according to census estimates. The biggest concentration of Democrats, according to election results, is in central Arkansas. That region's growth from 2015 to 2016 was less than 1 percent.
Democrats did not give Republicans a race over much of the state in the 2016 House elections, secretary of state records show. Democrats appeared on ballots for 48 of the 100 state House seats in that year's general election, according to those records. Therefore, Democrats could not have gained a majority if they had won in every House race in which they fielded a candidate.
Taylor Riddle, chief of staff for the Arkansas Democratic Party, confirmed that Whitaker is taking an active role in party efforts to recruit candidates for 2018.
"He can answer questions about what it's like to work in the Legislature, what to expect," Riddle said of Whitaker. "That is the kind of question candidates ask before they commit to a campaign. He can give them the information they are looking for."
He will not be applying litmus tests as he recruits candidates, Whitaker said.
Democrats are going to have to listen to voters and help them when and where they can, Whitaker said.
"When you quit listening to people, they figure it out," he said. "In my last general election, the AFL-CIO contacted their members in my district. The response they got was 50 percent, with the rest saying the Democrats had quit looking out for them. If you turn your back on people then, they turn their back on you."
That is what got the Democrats in the fix they are in now, he said.
"It all unraveled in two election cycles."
Metro on 06/26/2017