If a voter wants a say in who represents him in the Arkansas Legislature, then he needs to vote in a preferential party primary when there is one, election results show.
Relatively few Arkansas voters get the chance. In 2020, there were 21 contested primaries for the 117 legislative seats up for election. Sixteen were Republican contests, and five were Democratic.
Candidate filing for the May 24 party primaries begins Tuesday. In these primaries, voters choose each party's nominees for the general election.
The Arkansas Senate has 35 seats, and 17 were up for grabs in 2020. Eight of them had races between Republican and Democratic contenders in the general election; Republicans won seven.
Sen. Jane English, R-North Little Rock, was the only Republican to win her 2020 general election bid with less than 55% of the vote. She garnered 53.8% of the ballots. The only Democrat to win a contested race, Sen. Clarke Tucker of Little Rock, won with 64.9% of the vote in his district.
Party control of the state House was also settled before the November 2020 election, results show. All 100 seats were up for election. Of those, 62 had no major-party challenger in November. Of the 38 contested races, 33 winners got at least 55% of the vote.
This mean five races were competitive. Three of those five were close, with the winner garnering less than 51% of the vote.
The last four regular elections altogether saw legislative seats come up for election 470 times, with 158 legislative races involving a choice between a Republican and a Democrat on the November ballots. Republicans won 126.
Of the 158 races overall, 113 winners carried at least 55% of the vote. Of those 113, Republicans won 95.
Only 11 races -- 2.3% of the 470 potential contests and 7% of real races -- were close enough for the winner to prevail by carrying less than 51% of the vote.
Both Republicans in the present and Democrats in the past have enjoyed the benefits of having most elections settled by their party's primaries.
"It's the nature of the beast. Not even 15 years ago, you would have seen just as many races decided in Democratic primaries," said Sarah Jo Reynolds, executive director of the Republican Party of Arkansas. Republicans hold a majority in the Legislature.
Reynolds' Democratic counterpart, Grant Tennille, said the lack of campaign money for the Democrats is a big factor. Democrats lost contributions after losing the majority in the House in 2012 and then all the statewide constitutional offices in 2014, he said. The party competes where it can, but that leaves most seats to whomever the Republicans nominate, he said.
"I have people who tell me we ought to challenge every seat, but we can't, and some districts are 80-20" in their party preference, he said. "If we were sitting on a big pile of money, we'd get a whole lot more aggressive."
Arkansas is one of 15 "open primary" states in which a registered voter may vote in whichever primary he chooses, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures website. A voter who participated in the Democratic primary in 2020, for instance, may ask for a Republican primary ballot this year. The opposite also applies.
Although primaries are open, contested primaries are few, state election results show. The last four regular elections combined had a total of 96 contested primaries.
A voter who would rather not choose a partisan ballot may ask for a nonpartisan ballot listing only candidates in races for judicial offices -- state supreme court and appeals court justices, circuit and district judges and prosecutors.
"But if you're not active in politics, you don't know that," former state Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville, said of the option of switching between primaries between elections. "My last primary was in a year when we had a governor's race. We had 8.6% turnout for the primary."
That is far too low of a turnout to be representative of voters as a whole, he said.
Primaries give a few groups outsized influence, he said.
"If you don't have the NRA's endorsement, your chances in a Republican primary go down drastically," Douglas said. The same goes for other groups such as the conservative Family Council, he said.
Douglas supports a "top-two" primary where all candidates are listed on the same primary ballot. The two candidates with the most votes would then appear on the general election ballot regardless of party affiliation. This would lead to candidates with wider appeal getting to the general election, he said. He introduced a bill to create such a system, House Bill 1766 of 2017. It never got out of the House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee.
A petition drive attempting to put a similar measure on the Arkansas general election ballot in 2020 was disallowed by the state Supreme Court. The court ruled the group circulating the petition didn't follow legal requirements for screening petition canvassers.
"You may support a Republican for president and a Democrat for county judge, but you can't vote for the candidates of your choice in the system we have now," Douglas said of the primaries.
ONE-PARTY RULE
Having primaries dominate elections is prevalent in the South, but not elsewhere in the United States, said Angie Maxwell, director of the Diane Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
"Even in the South, it's at its most extreme in Arkansas," she said.
That prevalence of one-party rule with Democrats stemmed from the post-Reconstruction South enforcing white rule against newly freed Black voters, Maxwell said. The practice has opposed social change movements including the civil rights movement and feminism in the South ever since, whichever party is in power, she said.
The transition from complete Democratic control of the Legislature and the governor's seat to complete Republican control in Arkansas took two election cycles: 2012 and 2014.
The state Legislature in both the Senate and the House was majority Democratic continually from 1874 until 2012, state records show. Republicans won the majority of both chambers in the 2012 elections, taking over when newly elected lawmakers were sworn in at the beginning of 2013. Republicans still had to work with a Democratic governor until 2015.
Arkansas' shift from Democratic to Republican control was both more complete and faster than elsewhere, Maxwell said. Every other Southern state going from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican had more of a transition period than Arkansas did, Maxwell said. Each party and its legislators in those other Southern states went through some period in which they had to work together to get anything accomplished, she said. Arkansas barely did, with a closely divided 51-49 Republican majority in the House for one general session of the Legislature in 2013. In every regular session after that, Republicans enjoyed a super-majority of at least 64 in the House, increasing to 76 by 2021, and 24 in the Senate increasing to 28, state records show.
"The Republicans have never governed before, and the Democrats had never been in the minority before," Maxwell said.
Each of those roles requires a different set of skills, she said -- skills that take time to learn.
DEMOCRATS' STRATEGY
The Democratic Party of Arkansas' goal should be to break the Republican supermajority, Tennille said. Passing state budgets requires three-quarter supermajorities in each chamber of the Legislature under the Arkansas Constitution. Democrats need to gain two seats in the House or two seats in the Senate to have the leverage afforded by being able to stop a budget from passing in a party-line vote.
Democrats came within 34 votes out of 4,030 cast of gaining one Senate seat in a Feb. 8 special election in Senate District 7 in Washington County.
"The results last night will embolden them," Reynolds said in a phone interview Feb. 9. Republican nominee Colby Fulfer of Springdale won a four-person Republican primary in a runoff in the Senate District 7 special election. His Democratic opponent, Lisa Parks, is the second Springdale Democratic woman in recent years to shock Republicans in what used to be a Northwest Arkansas stronghold, Tennille said.
Rep. Megan Godfrey, D-Springdale, defeated incumbent Rep. Jeff Williams, R-Springdale, in 2018 to become the first Democrat to win a state House election in Springdale since 1998. She won a second term in 2020. She decided against running for reelection in 2020 after her district's borders changed during legislative redistricting.
The state Board of Apportionment split downtown Springdale and put Godfrey's residence in a district that extends into Benton County. The move drew more written objections than any other district change during the public comment period.
The Board of Apportionment redraws legislative district boundaries every 10 years after each U.S. census to equalize district population. The board consists of the sitting governor, attorney general and secretary of state -- all elected statewide. A majority of two of those three officeholders every post-census year came from the state's dominant party, whichever one that happened to be, state records show. The redistricting process finished in 2021 was done by an all-Republican panel, the first time that happened since the current system was adopted. The Board of Apportionment was created by a voter-approved state constitutional amendment in 1936.
"We have to do what Lisa and Megan did, and Springdale's looking pretty blue," Tennille said, referring to the blue and red colors often used on maps to show Democratic and Republican results in elections.
Parks' election run in particular showed a degree of cooperation and mutual assistance between different groups of Democrats he has not seen before, Tennille said.
"Parties tend to have regional and county silos," he said. "We had all sorts of groups help in this race, with a great candidate who did everything she could have done. We had statewide Democratic candidates who changed their itineraries so they could campaign for her."
Primaries alone are not going to maintain Republican majorities, Reynolds said in her interview.
"There are only two ways to run: unopposed and scared," she said.