A more partisan time

Arkansas Republicans are ad- amant that Democrats may not now nominate someone else for U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton to beat.

As you know, the Democrat whom Cotton originally would have beaten dropped out of the race abruptly and cryptically two hours after the ticket closed. That left Cotton unopposed for the general election, save a Libertarian and an independent.

Republicans say their adamance is about simple adherence to state law, which indeed seems clear: Unless the departing Democratic nominee is sick himself—a circumstance Josh Mahony has not asserted in any of his terse public statements on withdrawal— then the Democrats must let Cotton proceed to a second term without a Democratic opponent.

There might be other arguable points for litigation. You could contend that there is no real nominee until the primary is conducted and the nomination formally ratified. But the state law in question presumes to apply not only to elections, but primaries. Democrats may be out of luck. But their luck never was good.

Money might have something to do with the passion with which Republican Party chairman Doyle Webb vowed a legal fight over any attempted Democratic candidacy in his joint appearance Friday in Fayetteville with Democratic state chairman Michael John Gray.

If Cotton is not bothered for even a perfunctory defense of his job, then he could use his $4 million campaign fund to contribute maximum amounts to Republican candidates or give even larger sums to the party and its various federal and state committees.

He could help the state’s Republican congressional candidates. Cotton could even lather money on Republican office-seekers in, say, Iowa and New Hampshire, or any other state, if he were interested in running for president at some point, which he clearly is.

This is a different time from 1990. Then, the state’s politics were nonpartisan, only nominally Democratic, not by philosophy but default.

U.S. Sen. David Pryor, simply by his own personal popularity, escaped any Republican opposition to his re-election that year.

He eventually used some of his campaign fund for a charitable purpose, an option still allowed by law. He formed and seeded what is now the Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas, a veritable Arkansas treasure of recorded information useful to ages to come.

What’s different now is that the state’s politics are intensely partisan if only in a negative nationalized way. In-state Democrats are smeared in the eyes of dominant white rural conservative voters by association with national liberal Democrats.

Republicans these days don’t get elected on their own personality, as evidenced by the grim Cotton’s victories.

And I’m betting Cotton will not fund any charitable Arkansas treasure with his campaign money. I’m betting he will serve his own political interest. Perhaps he will surprise me pleasantly.

Conventional partisan thinkers on the Democratic side are distressed by the prospect of not having even a perfunctory Senate nominee. They say it harms other Democratic candidates and prevents the party from engaging in long-term party-building on a statewide basis.

Not being a partisan thinker, but a journalistic observer, I have a hard time fathoming that Mahony’s presence on the ticket as a sacrificial lamb to Cotton would have been valuable to other Democrats.

State Rep. Megan Godfrey doesn’t need a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate to help her run for re-election in Springdale. State Rep. Nicole Clowney doesn’t need one in Fayetteville. Joyce Elliott doesn’t need one in the 2nd District congressional race.

All of them will get more votes in their districts than Mahony would have received in them.

Anyway, Democrats needing a presence at the top of the ticket to drive energy ought to find Trump sufficient for that purpose. In that regard, there have been recent blemishes on the Trumpendorsement brand in Democratic gubernatorial wins in Kentucky and Louisiana, states bearing similarity to Arkansas.

But those losses were to centrist Democrats with popular name identification who were seeking state, not federal, office.

One was the sitting attorney general and son of a recent Democratic governor. The other was an incumbent Democratic governor managing to separate himself from the culturally alienating national Democratic label by signing an onerous anti-abortion bill and letting no one get to his right on guns.

That’s a sacrilege intolerable to many contemporary liberal Democrats. But I would point out that neutralizing those two issues allowed John Bel Edwards to stay in the Louisiana governor’s office and protect Medicaid expansion.

So for Democrats in the South, prospects come down to comforting name identification in pursuit of isolated local offices and occasional state ones, but not federal ones. It also comes down to the tradeoffs they’re willing to accept to try to get the culturally polarizing likes of Pelosi, Sanders, Warren and Ocasio-Cortez off their backs.

For Republicans in Arkansas, success rests simply in not being a Democrat, or, in Cotton’s case, not even having to bother with one.

Correction: French Hill defeated Clarke Tucker last year 52-46, with a Libertarian getting the rest, not 55-45, as I said Thursday.

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