Rett Tucker, dad of losing local Democratic congressional candidate Clarke Tucker, has favored me with precinct-by-precinct calculations from the election.
The numbers demonstrate, he asserts, that voters preferred Clarke more the closer they lived to him and presumably the better they knew him.
That may be so. Clarke indeed offers a high likeability factor.
But the calculations also fall seamlessly in line with an already-embedded and fast-advancing national trend. It is that people living in dense populations vote Democratic and people living in sparsely populated rural areas vote Republican.
It's been happening since the 1970s and it's really taken off in the ongoing Era of the Great American Divide, meaning Trump time.
Young Tucker got more than 70 percent of the vote inside Little Rock's city limits on Nov. 6. His margin dipped to 51 percent between Little Rock's city limits and the Pulaski County line, through transitional communities like Maumelle, Sherwood and Jacksonville.
Once beyond the county line, Tucker got resoundingly wiped out in rural-suburban places like Saline and Faulkner counties and more thoroughly rural ones like White, Perry and Conway counties.
That is hardly an Arkansas-unique situation. It is, for example, also a Texas situation.
The big U.S. Senate race in Texas was close, inside three points. But it was close only in viewing the statewide aggregate from the outside. It wasn't close from the inside, meaning in any local venue within Texas.
Either Democratic challenger Beto O'Rourke won overwhelmingly in Austin, San Antonio, Houston and Dallas or the narrowly surviving Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz, won by massive margins in the vast number of rural counties of the state.
Wherever you lived in Texas, the race didn't seem close from up close.
The phenomenon was cited in an online essay this week in The Atlantic on "geographic sorting," written by two academicians, Greg Martin of Stanford and Steven Webster of Washington University.
It's a national epidemic, to the extent that deepening cultural/political alienation renders us weaker and our ability to govern ourselves impaired.
Rural and sparsely populated states get a disproportionately high number of electoral college votes. Already in this century, we've had two second-place Republican presidential candidates win the electoral college and become inept-to-disgraceful presidents--from George W. Bush to the current atrocity.
The Atlantic article points out that geographic sorting occurs on a micro as well as macro basis, meaning on a smaller scale.
Consider the recent mayoral election, or first go-round, in Little Rock. Frank Scott solidly carried south and southwestern neighborhoods; Baker Kurrus solidly carried the western and Heights neighborhoods, and Warwick Sabin solidly carried midtown neighborhoods.
But, for all of that, the article contends that previously extolled analyses about Americans sorting themselves geographically by political preference and alliance--in pursuit primarily of cocoons of political like-mindedness--were wrong. It says, based on study, that people will choose a place to live by other factors more than by politics--job, school, a love of three-car garages or a love of mass transit--and that political preferences tend simply to get dragged along.
And the article argues that the mobility of the country--the willingness and ability of millions of Americans to move every year--means that political attitudes are slowly being re-dispersed throughout the country, like sugar cubes stirred in hot coffee, as the authors put it.
While it's true, the authors say, that place of residence tends to influence one's politics, the greater likelihood is that, in time, Americans will self-disperse and emerge less clustered by politics.
The article doesn't mention Arkansas, so I will.
States experiencing substantial population growth, with people moving from elsewhere in the country--such as to Georgia and North Carolina--tend to become purple in their politics, meaning competitive between liberalism and conservatism. Places that are static in their population--like Arkansas, except in Benton County--tend to stay as they are.
That means, in our case, conservative Republican. It means a place where the default vote goes to the "R" even as people vote as if populist or liberal Democrats to raise the minimum wage and approve medical marijuana.
That's because people are defined more by poverty and illness than political party.
Meantime, Arkansas trails a nation that itself waits for the sugar cubes to dissolve, which will take decades.
My interim solution remains as follows: California, with a 3 million-vote Democratic advantage and a thriving Information Age economy, should disperse about a million of its spare Democrats strategically to swing states--Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida. These people could take up residence in those states in time to vote in the next presidential election, all the while performing their jobs virtually via computer.
They could move back after they saved the country by foiling Donald Trump's re-election.
We could call it the Reverse Gold Rush.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/28/2018