There are fewer than 100 days left until the general election this November, but for some candidates on the ballot, their only contested race came during the primaries earlier this year. John C. Davis is a teaching associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. He recently wrote for the London School of Economics' U.S. Politics and Policy blog about three observations he noticed from this year's midterm primaries in Arkansas. He says the first one was partisan stasis.
John C. Davis: The Republicans have made historical gains in almost every part of the state that they can. And so if we look at the state General Assembly House and Senate maps, the districts that the GOP has won over the last decade, decade and a half, are in most cases still consistently theirs. Democrats have found some districts where the demographics and party loyalties shift in a way that allows them to maintain some of those seats. The GOP has supermajorities in the Legislature, and it looks like both parties — while I'm sure they would love to win more seats — are also, at least in the moment, particularly in the GOP's eyes, content to hold what they have. And Democrats, I think, are not so much trying to cut into, say, the majority for the GOP in this General Assembly, but they're probably trying to carve away at the supermajority, which would give them a seat at the table on many other key legislative issues, where right now they're largely on the sidelines. So that stasis was interesting to me.
And I've got a friend and colleague at UALR, Joseph Giammo, who tracks when candidates file and then what districts they're in, mainly to watch if these House or Senate districts are going to eventually have two-party competition going into the general election, because Arkansas has sort of a one-party tradition anyway. And a great number of these state legislative seats in particular have been settled in the primary. So you may have only a Republican filing or only a Democrat filing. And so what Joe has found is that this cycle in particular is even less competitive than it has been in the last few election cycles. And those weren't terribly competitive to begin with. So what that tells me is that both parties are focusing first and foremost on maintaining their advantages where they are, and then, where there may be a potential flip position, trying to find and cultivate some really strong talent and recruit some candidates in those districts. But really, all in all, there are very few competitive districts, and we're seeing that reflected, I think, in the map this election cycle.
Moore: So we're seeing a lot of stasis when we look at, as you kind of argue here, the primaries, which are really where the majority of elections are happening here in the state of Arkansas. Let's look for just a moment at two specific Senate races here, where we saw Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders endorse challengers for incumbents in the state. One was Sen. Bryan King. Another one was Sen. Ron Caldwell. The thing that they both have in common is that they were both vocally disapproving of the Franklin County prison. She endorsed challengers in both of those races, and those challengers lost pretty handily in both of those races. Do you think we have any lessons we can learn from those specific instances?
Davis: Well, just exactly what you're talking about — elite endorsements. We saw a lot of those this cycle, and those two in particular were noteworthy. That was one of the three things that I saw in this cycle that was of interest. It's not new to have a sitting governor endorse candidates in his or her party primary, although it is not the historical norm. So it is not unprecedented that Gov. Sanders did that, but it's also not terribly common. And so I think there was a lot of media attention on those endorsements, and it put a lot of pressure on the endorsement — whether or not endorsements matter. We don't know a lot in political science about localized endorsements like this. When we talk about endorsements in politics, we typically are thinking about presidential nominations, when a sitting governor may endorse a candidate. So think back — Gov. Sanders endorsing then-former President, now President, Trump — that would be the type of endorsement that we typically see and follow. So it's with a little less confidence that I can say that, typically, elite endorsements, if we're drawing conclusions and applying them to the state level, are pretty risky, and there's not a whole lot of anticipated return on that. And the situation we're discussing is when an elected official in office — say, a governor — is endorsing against their own party's incumbent, right?
And that shows that there's some in-party fighting, some fractioning occurring in the party caucus, which again kind of gets to my third point — that that's not that unusual when we have one-party-dominated state politics. Politics are competitive. They are going to compete typically between Democrats and Republicans. But if there aren't enough Democrats to compete against, I think we're going to see the dominant party — in this case, the Republican Party — have some fighting, some drama, if you will, within their own party ranks.
And so what we saw there was localized politics in the Franklin County prison debate. We saw some key members of the Legislature who work with the governor on a lot of policy issues but didn't see eye to eye on this one, and she sought out to support candidates who were running against these individuals, and again, got more media attention on those races because of her involvement and her endorsement. If I remember correctly, I think Kid Rock was also involved in the endorsement, and President Trump, I think, was at least on one of those endorsement mailers that I saw.
So this is elite endorsement, and a state Senate or state representative position is a pretty local race. And so you had a local concern, you had local constituents, you had incumbents who apparently have strong ties back home, and I think that was able to counteract the appeal of elite endorsements. I don't think in this case those two endorsements losing are any sort of indictment against Gov. Sanders' performance or even her support in those districts. But I think it's just one of these things — we go back to the literature, and there's a lot of nuance and caveats as to whether or not endorsements matter. And in this case, I just don't think that they did.
Moore: One of your colleagues, Karen Sebold, spoke to me a while ago, talking about elections and campaign finance and these sorts of things. And one of the things she talks about is this idea that we've not just moved from nationalization of politics, but the presidentialization of politics — really looking through the lens of everything going through the president, whether it's the current administration or previous ones. It's a very new phenomenon. When you think about local state representatives or state senators talking about the border, they're talking about issues that really they don't have much control over, and yet the viewpoint is through the lens of the president. That's really fascinating and seems to be where we could potentially see some fracturing.
Davis: And that tends to be the trend. I think Dr. Sebold is spot on. Matthew, I think that's what made these two races so interesting to follow — we saw these two cases run against that trend. We saw where the old Tip O'Neill adage, "politics is local," seemed to kick in in the Republican ranks in this Republican primary, and both of these candidates are the presumptive incumbents who will be reelected as well, because these aren't terribly competitive districts for Democrats. So the Republicans have won these primaries and will probably be the nominees, or be sworn back in, in January in the legislative session.
But this was, I think, in some ways a trial of nationalized politics again. You had some celebrity status, you had the president of the United States, and you had — most notably, I think, for us who follow state politics in Arkansas — the governor and a political action committee that was aligned with her as well, helping support these other candidates. Despite that, the incumbents prevailed. So I think you're exactly right, and I agree with Dr. Sebold — we've moved into a more nationalized politics. And that's a politics that, over the last 20 years or so, has greatly helped the Republican Party in Arkansas and has greatly been a problem for Democrats in the state, as the national narratives between the two parties align our more moderate to conservative Arkansas voters with the Republican Party, and has left many of those people feeling, or at least stating that they feel, alienated by the Democratic Party. But all that to say, apparently local politics can prevail, and as a dyed-in-the-wool Arkansan, I'm okay with us having local issues in local races.
Moore: Your first observation was stasis. Your second observation was endorsements. Tell me about the third observation.
Davis: Really, it's just more about this intraparty conflict. I think it's perfectly natural that we would see this. If we look back in history in Arkansas, of course, we would be looking at Democratic dominance for the overwhelming majority of the state's history, but they always had really contentious primaries. They had a lot of Democratic contests that would spill over into the headlines of newspapers. There were rivalries. A lot of these things, though, were based not so much on policy or ideology and more really on having perhaps two or three really progressively ambitious individuals in one seat. It's like musical chairs — they're vying for these roles. It's really the politics of personality and connections and their districts back home, and retail politics. I'm not saying those things don't matter at all anymore, but I think they matter less in our more nationalized politics. And what we're seeing now is the brand of the party being essentially important to the success of the Republicans and those running for Republican offices. Primary voters, particularly in the Republican primary, seem to seek out a certain sort of brand and ideological consistency, which is kind of new to Arkansas and Arkansas politics. And so that leads, I think, to some of this infighting that we're seeing. Some of it, I think, again, you just chalk up to the fact that if you're an ambitious person and you want to be in public office, an elected office, and you're a Republican, you're going to be with a big group of people competing for a few seats. And so that's perfectly natural. What's new here is that we're seeing contests to challenge another person further to the right, and — to use a sports analogy — you'll see incumbents try to sort of box out these individuals. And if they can't do that successfully, say, in a legislative session, there's a decent chance they're going to have someone to contend with in a primary.
Moore: As we look at the upcoming election cycle here, I don't know that we're going to see a lot of contested races on the local level. We will see some contested races at the national and federal level. Is there anything you're looking at specifically that's interesting to you, that you're thinking about with the upcoming general election?
Davis: I don't expect a lot of surprises in Arkansas politics in November, to be absolutely honest. But the one race that seems to be showing the most energy, I would say, is the reelection bid of Sen. Tom Cotton against Democratic challenger Hallie Shoffner. Shoffner has been covering the state, campaigning, really going at retail politics hard and trying to have a message that resonates with a lot of voters who, at least in the last several election cycles, have not supported Democrats — which I think is an interesting take for her. And given her background in farming, and the issues particularly that farmers have had over the last decade, particularly in the last few years, that may resonate with some folks. On the other hand, Sen. Cotton is very well funded, well supported. He has the incumbency advantage and certainly has the support of the Republican rank and file in the state, which, if we look at the math, carries a majority of the voting population — if we were holding an election today based on previous elections.
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