In state’s best interests

State Sen. Joyce Elliott, the liberal lion who chastises me for calling her a tilter at windmills, tilted at windmills on social media Wednesday.

“I voted yesterday,” she wrote. “And I voted the Democratic ballot because we need to grow a strong Democratic Party. I have no interest in trying to rebuild the Pre-Trump Republican Party nor maintaining the current Trump Party by voting Republican in this primary.”

It was not clear how it might provide growth for the state Democratic Party for a confirmed Democratic partisan to vote per usual in a Democratic primary in the state’s near-only Democratic city.

This beloved liberal lion simply roared in defense of the status quo.

Elliott has been voting Democratic all her voting life, including the last dozen years while the state Democratic Party collapsed into irrelevance. That’s happened mainly because the national Democratic Party has gone so “progressive”—meaning politically inept—as to blow off rural independent voters. That has poisoned any name appearing beside a “D” anywhere in Arkansas except Little Rock and few other patches. Or oases, if you prefer, as Joyce Quixote surely does.

Elliott was mildly lashing out, if off point, in response to a certain percolating potential strategy for these primaries. The strategy may not come to anything because it’s widely held that people don’t vote strategically, but reflexively.

But there are those—I among them—who behold with interest that 55 of the state’s 75 counties have no local or state legislative Democratic primaries, but a host of Republican ones. Our thinking is that those counties are so thoroughly Republican that, if the rare Democrat living in them wishes to have a positive impact locally, then that rare Democrat ought to avail himself or herself of our open-primary system and vote in the Republican primary.

That’s especially so if one’s area has an incumbent extremist Republican legislator opposed by a more conventional conservative Republican. There are about a dozen to 15 cases of that. For less-nutty Republicans to win those races with Democratic and independent help would make the state Legislature, while still conservative in reflection of a conservative state, more responsibly so and less destructively so.

But hardened party-over-state Democrats decry any such pragmatism, calling it destructive to the party, as if there was much left to destroy.

I can vote Democratic as usual in Little Rock and do my small part to boost the exemplary Chris Jones to the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. I can choose to do that because it would be good for Arkansas. I can, without contradiction, simultaneously endorse as also good for Arkansas the idea that Democrats living in Republicanville should cross over in their counties to raise relevant voices in trying to make the state Legislature less destructive.

Elliott’s lecture was delivered in a more candid tone by another Democrat on social media who asked why Democrats should be asked to vote in Republican primaries to try to save Republicans from themselves and their craziest candidates. This person advocated: Let’s just let the Republicans destroy themselves and the state, by which they and the state will get what they deserve.

“Arkansas Democrats advocate state destruction” … I’m not sure about the quality of that objective or value of that headline.

It may be that, in some of these counties without Democratic primaries, there are unopposed Democratic candidates proceeding to the general election ballot. But the strategic point is that those Democrats almost assuredly will lose.

“November will be too late” to make any difference, newly minted independent state Sen. Jim Hendren, founder of Common Ground Arkansas, has explained.

But let’s suppose for sake of argument that a Democratic candidate might be a prospect to pull an upset in November for a legislative seat in a Republican hotbed. All that would mean from the Democratic perspective is that those local Democratic voters would get two chances to serve the state interest—one in the primary to vote for the lesser-evil Republican to make things somewhat better, and the second for the Democrat in November to make things presumably better still.

Someone is surely asking for names of these supposedly saner Republican options to destructive extremist legislative incumbents. I’ve dropped a few before: Mayor Peter Christie of Bella Vista, Jim Tull of Rogers, Roy Hester of Branch, Bob Largent of Harrison and Steve Cromwell of Magnolia.

Then there is the reverse situation with a couple of reasonable problem-solving Republican legislative incumbents fielding challenges from the destructive extreme. Those reasonable ones are Rep. Lee Johnson of Greenwood and state Sen. James Sturch of Batesville.

Liberal lions in Little Rock may prefer the most extreme Republican legislators in those cases, but that doesn’t mean y’all have to.

P.S.—Early voting numbers in Pulaski County seem to indicate some crossover from Democrats and/or independents to the Republican primary. Pulaski is not a county where that strategy is needed. So, I think it reflects a number of people who so disdain Sarah Sanders they want to take every chance to vote against her.