ICYMI: Democrats’ Fall May Be Deepest in Arkansas

By Campbell Robertson, New York Times: [Excepts] BRYANT, Ark. — That Democrats are in trouble is hardly news these days, at least in most places. They are certainly in trouble here, from Congressional representatives to state legislators to officeholders whose power stops at the town limits.

But Democrats in Arkansas, who have long dominated state and local offices despite the state’s essentially conservative electorate, have not been in this much trouble for as long as anyone can remember, at least anyone who was not around during Reconstruction. “It is a very big deal,” said Rex Nelson, who was a press secretary for former Gov. Mike Huckabee and political editor of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “This has never happened, not in my lifetime.”

The Democrats’ trouble runs from top to bottom. In poll after poll, Blanche Lincoln, the senior senator, is trailing her Republican challenger, John Boozman, the state’s lone Republican congressman.

The Democrat running for Congress in the central part of the state, a district that has been in the party’s hands for 92 of the last 100 years, is also running far behind, and there is a better than even chance that a Republican could take the first Congressional district in the northeastern part of the state, too, which would make him the first Republican in that seat since 1875.

The state legislature, while it will remain in Democratic control, could have the largest number of Republicans ever. Even the historically ho-hum races for offices like lieutenant governor and land commissioner . . . . A state-wide wave of Republican victories would be shocking, but even if that does not happen . . . many are surprised by the mere fact that there are so many tough races at all.

Arkansas has been something of a political outlier over the last few decades. It is a mostly Southern state, with a mostly conservative Southern outlook but without the Southern shade of red. The state has voted for Republican presidents, but eight of its last 10 governors have been Democrats, and the state has sent exactly one Republican to the Senate in the past 130 years . . . Three of its four representatives in the United States House are Democrats, as are 99 of its 135 state legislators.

. . . Students of Arkansas politics point out the state’s long tradition of rural populism, the slow development of its suburbs and a run of uncommonly adept Democratic politicians . . . Arkansas also has a smaller percentage of black residents than other Southern states, where Democrats must court black voters and rural white voters with equal zeal, leading to messages that are at times so divergent as to be contradictory.

But this political science may soon become political history. The question is whether this is a singular tremor in an anti-establishment year or an earthquake. . . . The answer may lie somewhere in the first Congressional district, among the cotton and soybean fields of the Mississippi delta. Ms. Lincoln got her political start here, and her successor, a reliable Blue Dog, will be leaving the seat after 14 years. But the Democrat running to replace him, Chad Causey, is now in a fight for survival against his Republican opponent, a farm report broadcaster named Rick Crawford.

. . . “They really want to be Democrats, their fathers and grandfathers were Democrats,” . . . “But the Democratic Party has left the state.” This falling-out goes back before 2008, on issues like abortion, but 2008 is when the divorce was made formal: John McCain won the state by double the margin of victory that George W. Bush had in 2004 (Mark Pryor, a Democrat, won his Senate seat with nearly 80 percent of the vote that same year). . . . But the complaints were mainly fiscal, about the “giveaway money” that the Democrats — and Republicans, and anybody in Washington for that matter — seemed to be handing out.

While many of the farmers bristled defensively when the topic of agricultural subsidies was raised in this context, one even suggested heretically that he would be open to a reduction in subsidies — farms in the district received nearly $6 billion in subsidies after the past 15 years — just to get spending under control. Other farmers said they would vote against Ms. Lincoln because of her vote for the health care bill, even though she is in a position to help them as the chairwoman of the Senate agriculture committee.

The frustration — and it is more frustration than Tea Party-style anger — runs that deep. . . . [Full Article]

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