I can’t say that I am an expert on Arkansas politics. What I know is that the state has remained friendlier to Democrats than the rest of the Deep South. Until last year, it enjoyed a special status, with a popular Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, and a Democrat-majority congressional delegation. In 2010, Sen. Blanche Lincoln barely survived a primary challenge and then was thumped out of office. Meanwhile, the Democrats lost two congressional seats and are poised to lose another next year. Maybe the legacy of the Clintons is starting to wear off.
It seems to me that the state has now started to behave like other Deep South states, which means that Democrats are at a major disadvantage. Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) must be a little worried. He was fortunate in 2008. Because the Republicans expected Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination and to have major coattails in Arkansas, no Republicans filed to run against Pryor. His only opposition was from the Green Party. Pryor knows he won’t be so lucky in 2014. He also knows that President Obama is unlikely to do well in Arkansas next year. As a historical matter, the president’s party doesn’t do well in his sixth year in office, so Pryor had plenty of reasons to be concerned about his prospects when he faces the voters three years from now.
I understand his predicament, but I wonder if he has a good plan for weathering the storm. Part of his strategy is to maintain some distance from the president and from the national Democratic Party. That’s why he was one of just two Democrats (along with Joe Lieberman) who filibustered the president’s bill yesterday to fund teachers, police officers, and firefighters. Even if Pryor had supported the bill, it would have come up nine votes short of the magic sixty needed to pass anything in the Senate these days. So, essentially, it was a free vote for Pryor. In voting against ending debate, he did little more or less than pad his record of disloyalty. I guess he hopes this will help him somehow three years from now.
But I think he’s got it all wrong. If his state is generically inclined to support a conservative candidate, they need some reason to vote for a Democrat instead. Pryor can try to solve that problem by being very conservative himself, but then he has to distinguish himself on some issues or people will prefer the more conservative candidate to the lesser one. Where better to make that distinction than on economic populism. He can be socially conservative, like almost all Arkansas politicians, but simultaneously stand up for the little guy against the big New York banks and the East Coast elite. Here was a bill that put a small tax on millionaires to put more teachers in the classroom, and more firefighters and police officers on the beat. It seems like the perfect bill for someone like Pryor to support to demonstrate to the people of Arkansas why a Democrat is preferable to a Republican. And, yet, he voted against it.
Perhaps he is looking at polling that shows that stimulus spending is unpopular in his home state. Or, maybe, he’s seeing that the president is very unpopular in Arkansas, and he wants to maintain his distance. My argument against that is that it’s all relative. The worse the president polls in Arkansas, the harder Pryor will have to fight to be reelected. When the president is making an argument that can actually sell well in Arkansas, Pryor should hop on the bandwagon and push that argument as hard as he can. Poll results are affected by how the questions are worded, and even if stimulus spending doesn’t poll well in Arkansas, taxing millionaires to fund more teachers, firefighters, and police officers surely does. Sen. Pryor should be out there “wording” the debate in his own favor.
But, instead, he’s falling in line with the conservative narrative. For the life of me, I can’t see how that helps him.
