In a typically excellent article, Sean Trende looked at the Arkansas Senate race, where Republican Tom Cotton will be taking on the incumbent, Democrat Mark Pryor.
So how did Pryor win? First, he held down Hutchinson’s margins in the traditionally Republican parts of the state in the Northwest...
The problem for Pryor is threefold. First, a large part of the southern realignment has been generational, and it has hit the rural South especially hard in the past decade. If you were 5 years old when the Great Depression started, and spent your formative years with FDR in the White House, you would have been 77 in 2002...
Second, as the Democrats have moved toward a more urban, upscale coalition, and developed an agenda that caters to those groups, they’ve paid an increasing price with downscale, rural voters...
Third, and perhaps most important, running against Cotton in an off-year election is a strategic and demographic nightmare for Pryor...
There is a fourth reason, and it ties back to part of the first line I excerpted above-- the traditionally Republican parts of the state in Northwest Arkansas. This happens to be where I currently call home.
No, I am not the fourth reason; I do not move the needle, so to speak. But people like me are-- people who are growing the region. Northwest Arkansas is one of the fastest growing areas in the country (from 1990-2000, the sixth fastest growing, to be exact, and while I do not have the numbers to back it up, my perception is that it has not slowed down much since then, if at all).
I took a few minutes to look up some data from the Arkansas Secretary of State's website to put this in the proper context. In 1992, the two counties that have the bulk of the NWA population (Washington and Benton) comprised 9.6% of the statewide vote. In 2002, when Pryor beat Hutchinson, it was up to 11.6%. In last year's election, the tally was up to 14.1%. This recent trend is not certain to continue, but I expect it will, at least for a while longer.
I updated this article a short while after posting, to cut down on the excerpt of Sean's article. I am pretty sure he didn't mind the length of the excerpt, but I think this post works better shortened. Read all of Sean's rationale at the link.
