Switching from blue to red
It doesn’t matter if one is a Democrat, Republican or independent. If you love Arkansas history and politics as much as I do, the speed with which Arkansas moved from one of the most Democratic states in the country to one of the most Republican states is absolutely breathtaking. It mainly happened during three election cycles: 2010, 2012 and 2014.
“On the morning of Election Day in 2010, Democrats occupied three of the four Arkansas seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, both U.S. Senate seats, all state constitutional offices and held decisive majorities in both chambers of the Arkansas General Assembly,” John C. Davis of Fayetteville writes in his book “From Blue to Red,” recently released by the University of Arkansas Press. “Within five years, Arkansas Republicans would hold all six U.S. congressional positions, every state constitutional seat and claim growing super-majorities in both state chambers.
“Over the next two election cycles, Republicans would enjoy unprecedented electoral success in Arkansas—the last remaining member of the once Solid South held by Democrats. By 2015, the Republican Party— the same party that failed to recruit candidates in many high-profile races as recently as 2010—not only held majorities in the state legislative chambers for the first time since Reconstruction but also had orchestrated one of the fastest, most powerful statewide political waves in the United States.”
Davis, an eighth-generation Arkansan, is executive director of the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Like many of us, he remains intrigued with what he describes as the “dramatic, swift shift from Democratic Party majority control of government, stemming as far back as the 19th century, to Republican Party dominance.”
My grandfather held almost every elected office in Prairie County, including county judge in the 1930s. He was a Democrat. He died at age 96 in the hot summer of 1980. I showed up at his funeral at the First Baptist Church of Des Arc with a Ronald Reagan bumper sticker on my car.
He would have been shocked to see me go on to run Republican campaigns for Congress and governor. He would have been even more shocked to see me work for a Republican governor (Mike Huckabee) and a Republican president (George W. Bush). I was that rare exception in Arkansas: someone who identified himself as Republican.
“Previously, Republicans had found success in regional pockets in the state, such as northwest Arkansas, and occasionally took advantage of national political trends down ticket, but these wins were somewhat isolated, and, in many cases, temporary,” Davis writes. “For the most part, Arkansas remained stubbornly tied to the Democratic Party. While the shift in the partisan makeup of Arkansas office holders may appear to have happened almost overnight, the rise of Republicans in Arkansas was years, if not decades, in the making.”
Davis’ book explores what he describes as “changes in voter preference at the top of the ticket in the 1960s, generational replacement in Arkansas’ political power structure in the 1990s, party organizational strategies coming to fruition in the 2000s, and a more nationalized and polarized electorate.”
In his classic 1949 book “Southern Politics in State and Nation,” political scientist V.O. Key wrote that “perhaps in Arkansas we have the one-party system in its most undefiled and undiluted form.”
“The state has been a fascination to political party scholars and those who study Southern politics in particular,” Davis says. “While there were certainly surges of Republican political strength in the state since the mid-20th century, these were either isolated in presidential-election returns—a plurality of Arkansas voters has not favored a non-native, non-Southern Democratic candidate for president since John F. Kennedy in 1960—or brief aberrations at the state level.
“For example, Winthrop Rockefeller in 1966 and Frank White in 1980 each won gubernatorial races as Republicans but faced stiff Democratic opposition in the Legislature and struggled to build the political base among Arkansas voters that a fledgling organization’s political longevity requires.”
Small pockets of the Ozarks—such as Searcy and Madison counties—had generational Republicans whose ancestors had opposed secession in 1861. But such families weren’t common statewide.
“The peculiar situation of Arkansas’ politics had been that it remained a solid one-party Democratic state even as other Southern states began the transition from Democratic Party domination to reliably Republican,” Davis writes. “While it is common for states, or even the federal government, to have periods of unified government—where the majority of the legislative branch and leader of the executive branch are represented by the same party for a time—Arkansas’ preference for Democratic candidates was historically consistent.
“The one-party dominance in the Natural State was not only noteworthy—it was, in fact, more enduring than any other in the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, growing numbers of Arkansans began to prefer Republican presidential candidates at the top of the ballot over any non-Southern Democratic candidates. However, Arkansas continued to be one of the most Democratic states in the Union. This trend continued even as the 21st century approached.”
Davis asks this question: “Political party scholars have long contended that competitive parties are important components of a democratic government. Given the state’s historical one-party dominance by Democrats, and the considerable strength currently exhibited among Republicans in the state’s politics, has Arkansas simply traded one party’s dominance for another?”
The real question is this: Does Arkansas remain a MAGA outpost after that strange movement ceases to be a factor at the national level, or does the state return to a more traditional form of Republicanism? I hope that’s the subject of Davis’ next book.
Gov. Sarah Sanders isn’t really a Republican governor. She isn’t a conservative, either. She’s a MAGA governor. The sooner we recognize that fact, the sooner we’ll be able to restore sanity to Arkansas politics.
Last month, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette printed letters from former Arkansas first lady Gay White and Mary Remmel Wohlleb of Little Rock. White is the widow of the late Gov. Frank White. And no Arkansas family was more identified with the GOP in the early 1900s than the Remmel family.
The MAGA crowd has more in common with the segregationist Democrats of the Orval Faubus era than they do the brave Winthrop Rockefeller Republicans who opposed Faubus during that dark chapter in Arkansas history. I have great respect for the Remmel family, the White family and others who worked to build a two-party system.
I worked full time in a Republican campaign for the first time 40 years ago. There were so few of us who publicly identified as Republicans that we were all on a first-name basis. It chaps my hide now when some loudmouth with no sense of Arkansas history describes the good people I worked with back then as RINOs. If they only knew what we were up against.
As Wohlleb wrote: “How did this party that many in my family so loved deteriorate into a caricature of itself? Recently, I’ve grown to admire Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Ike. They would all be considered RINOs in today’s party. The self-serving Trumpian politicians are the true RINOs, having abandoned significant policies and stands of a once-great party.”