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.
But are the people moving into NW Arkansas of the same political persuasion as the natives? North Carolina was once a reliable Republican state, and has seen large population increases in the past decade plus. Republicans crowed about the population increases occurring in the so-called sunshine states, but the people moving into NC are actually heavily Democrat. A PPP poll from last year showed that people who had been in NC for 10+ years favored Romney by 14 points, while those who had been in the state less than 10 years favored Obama by 31. What do we know about the newcomers in NW Arkansas?
ReplyDeleteI apologize for not posting your comment for so long; as I warned in the disclaimer above the comment box, I am not planning on checking the moderation queue often.
ReplyDeleteYour point is one that I probably should have addressed in my post, as it would have made it a stronger one. Thanks for raising it so that I can rectify it here.
No doubt, there is a possibility that the population moving into NWA could be less Republican than the population that has been here for a while.
Leaving aside the partisan composition of the influx, the relative strength of the Republican and Democrat party organizations in Benton and Washington counties is such that the GOP is better positioned to turn Republican-leaning transplants into votes than the Democrats are.
However, I believe that more Republican leaning people have moved to the area than Democrat leaning people.
If one squints at data hard enough, one might be able to see this. For example, Romney scored a higher percentage of the Benton County vote in 2012 than George W. Bush did in 2004. Granted, different candidates so it's not perfectly clear, and down-ballot races don't provide great comparisons either-- for example, Rep. Womack did not have a Democratic opponent.
It also makes some intuitive sense, though. The primary driver of growth in the region is Walmart. Thanks to union agitation, the company is not looked upon as favorably by the left as it is by the right. It would not surprise me at all, therefore, if there was self-selection effects favoring the GOP when it comes to who decides to move to the area.