Now that Pulaski County has been neutered--rendered an alien blue peninsula in a deep red sea--Pulaskians' concerns should shift to whether full evisceration is next.
Neutering is serious, but evisceration is nasty.
The balkanization of the 2nd Congressional District--occurring since the 2000s--achieved a remarkable new level in Tuesday's voting.
Pulaski County cast 53 percent of the votes in the 2nd District's congressional race between incumbent Republican French Hill and Democratic challenger Clarke Tucker. Of those, Tucker got 59 percent. That came to a 27,000-vote advantage for Tucker out of 135,000 cast in Pulaski. The six counties composing the rest of the district cast about 117,000 votes.
How in the world did Tucker, with 59 percent of 53 percent, not win the congressional seat? Here's how: Pulaski County is abutted not by adjoining counties, but different solar systems.
Of those remaining 117,000 or so votes, French Hill got about 80,000. Hill won districtwide with 16,000 more votes--131,000 to 115,000, with the rest going to a minor Libertarian distraction.
It was no big deal that Pulaski gave Tucker a 27,000-vote advantage. Saline County to its southwest gave Hill a 16,000-vote edge. Faulkner County to its northwest gave him a 10,000-vote edge. And White County to its northeast was redder than them all percentage-wise, casting more than 16,000 votes for Hill and not quite 5,000 for Tucker.
I can't imagine what mild-mannered Clarke Tucker ever did to the people of White County. But it must have been bad.
All of that is to say that Republicans in control of Arkansas have the Democrats in Pulaski County thoroughly surrounded, contained and minimized.
But it is not to say that, in a spirit of meanness of which they're capable, Republicans couldn't use their legislative majority to redraw the four congressional districts after the 2020 Census to do more than isolate, contain and minimize Pulaski. They could punish it.
"You mean like the Fayetteville Finger?" a Republican legislator said to me last week when I mentioned funny business in the reapportionment process.
You might remember that, in 2011, after the last census, Democrats initially proposed to run the 4th Congressional District along a conspicuously narrow northward chute--a finger--from around Interstate 40 in western Arkansas up into Fayetteville. The point was to give the then-Democratic congressman, Mike Ross, fresh Democratic cover amid the Tea Party revolution raging across his Lower Arkansas district.
Now consider: After the census in 2020, and upon the legislative session of 2021, the 4th District across south Arkansas will have lost relative population and will require new territory. Ditto for the 1st District along the state's eastern side.
The logical solution would be to let both those districts take territory from the exploding 3rd District in Northwest Arkansas, which must lose territory, probably to constrict mainly to Benton and Washington counties.
But, for GOP playfulness or meanness, and depending on what needs further rearranging after the 3rd is constricted, it happens that both the 4th and 1st districts border the 2nd District.
One alternative for the 4th would be to take Saline County from the 2nd. An alternative for the 1st would be to take White County from the 2nd.
But, without Saline County in the 2nd, we'd be having a recount in the Hill-Tucker race. Without White County, a better Democratic candidate than Tucker, if there is one, would have had a fighting chance against a worse Republican candidate than Hill, if there is one.
How, then, about this: The Republican Legislature might choose a "Little Rock Finger" to run the 4th District northward across Pulaski's narrow Grant County border into Little Rock, to just south of Hill's residence; or run the 1st District over from Lonoke County into Little Rock to just west of Hill's residence.
Those living south or east of French Hill in Little Rock would find themselves represented by someone called Bruce Westerman or Rick Crawford. Pulaski would be more than isolated; it would be rent asunder.
Pulaski County's only alternative would be litigation alleging districts were drawn arbitrarily in ways that divided common interests illogically and unfairly.
But there may soon be a better option: David Couch, the lawyer and activist whose citizen-initiative efforts have netted us a medicinal marijuana amendment and a higher minimum wage, vows to come back in 2020 with an amendment to take the congressional apportionment job from the Legislature.
Gerrymandering has become such a citizen concern that four states on Tuesday passed initiatives much like what Couch intends to push in Arkansas. As drafted, his proposed amendment would install a commission for both congressional districting and legislative apportionment made up of two Republicans and two Democrats appointed by their partisan legislative leaders. Those four partisans would then have to agree on selecting three independent members, presumably for expertise in numbers or mapping.
It might be in Pulaski County's interest to give the proposal even more votes than it gave Clarke Tucker.
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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 11/11/2018