Arkansas primary election recap

Arkansas held its partisan primary elections yesterday, and their significance in the Southern regional context is the likelihood that Arkansas will remain among the only Democratic Party strongholds below the Mason-Dixon line.

The evidence lies in a number of areas. First of all, Democratic primary voter turnout far outnumbered that on the Republican side, reflecting voter identification that will surely be a factor in the November general election.

Also, the Republicans show signs of erasing the progress they made in the last decade, when they elected the first Republican U.S. senator from Arkansas since reconstruction (Tim Hutchinson, in 1996), and controlled the governor's mansion and the lieutenant governor's office from 1996 to the present with the administration of Mike Huckabee and Win Rockefeller. Hutchinson was defeated by U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor in 2002, and Huckabee and Rockefeller are term-limted and will leave office in January.

This year, the Republicans are going back to their old losing model, when they nominated radically conservative candidates from Northwest Arkansas, where their marginal voting base is concentrated. Their nominees for the three top state offices (governor, lt. governor and attorney general), all fit that description, which will make it difficult for them to appeal beyond the small pool of voters who cast ballots in the Republican primary.

The Democrats already are certain to maintain commanding majorities in both houses of the state legislature, and they are expected to hold on to some lower state constitutional offices. So if they sweep the top three offices, the party will dominate state government.

In that sense, Arkansas is an interesting exception to recent Southern political history, during which traditional Democratic voters converted to the Republican party in response to social and cultural appeals. Republicans in Arkansas clearly thought the same transformation was inevitable in Arkansas, and they had reason to believe things were moving in that direction. But all signs point to a rollback of Republican gains this year and the re-establishment of Democratic dominance in state government.