Cooking up a scheme

Hendren group pushes crossover voting

Pretend for a moment you like to bake cakes. Or maybe you really enjoy doing it, in which case, well, let’s be friends.

But we digress …

If you’re a great baker and it’s your birthday, you undoubtedly get to pick your favorite dessert, decide which ingredients go into it and make it exactly as you want. It might be a coconut cake with ketchup on top, but if that’s what you want, by all means have it.

If you put that cake in the window of a bakery, though, it’s doubtful many customers will be willing to scoop it up. It doesn’t matter how much you love that coconut-ketchup cake, it’s just not a flavor many others like enough to purchase.

For years now, most Arkansans haven’t really liked the cake baked up and offered every couple of years by the Democratic Party. The cake Democrats used to bake, a long time ago, was perfect for Arkansas, but either tastes changed or something about the ingredients the Democrats are using nowadays just isn’t pleasing to the palates of most Arkansans.

Republicans, for a while now, have been selling their cakes like, well, hotcakes every time a baking contest comes along, oh, say, about every two years. Let’s say it’s a triple chocolate layer cake. Arkansans are willing to embrace Republicans’ offerings sometimes even when they’re half-baked, as long as the main ingredients suit their tastes.

Enter Jim Hendren, a soon-to-be-former state senator from Benton County, who has spent years at the State Capitol collaborating on all sorts of Republican-flavored dishes. Indeed, he’s favored the Republican menu virtually his whole life. All things being even, he probably still would, except that some of the ingredients the Republicans are using these days seem a bit pungent and leave a bad taste in his mouth.

In other words, he’s just fine with a triple chocolate layer cake, but he’d like it with fewer nuts.

Hendren made a big show of leaving the Republican kitchen without leaving politics. He’s officially an independent now, and he’s opened up his own political kitchen known as Common Ground, dedicated to the notion that triple chocolate cakes are sometimes great, and sometimes a coconut cake can be the right serving. It might be that a triple chocolate coconut cake sometimes works, too. In his kitchen, he’s not really interested in ketchup on his baked goods and the fewer nuts, the better.

Common Ground suggests an interesting approach this spring as Arkansans prepare to pick whose cake they want to eat for the next two or four years. They’ll do that on May 24 or in the days leading up to it, when they go vote.

Hendren suggests people who usually vote as Democrats might want to consider how much better the next few years might be if, instead of favoring coconut-ketchup cake few fellow Arkansans are willing to consume, they embrace the triple chocolate cake that’s far more likely to win the contest. And why would they do that? Again, it would reduce the chances that the final result had very many nuts in it.

Let’s step out of the baking analogy for a moment, if for no other reason it’s making our sweet tooth hurt and it’s probably got too many layers already.

In a recent Democrat-Gazette story, Hendren said 85% of the elections for the Arkansas Legislature will be decided in the May primaries. Common Ground Arkansas, the organization he created, wants Arkansans to forego party loyalties in Arkansas’ open Democratic and Republican primaries and choose instead to cast their votes in whichever party primary they will have the most impact.

In Benton County, for example, the organization’s website-based “Personal Impact Calculator” shows voters can have more impact by voting in the Republic primary, where there are far more races, including ones where the winner in May won’t face a challenger in November.

Same in Washington County. In fact, out of Arkansas’ 75 counties, only seven (all of them along the state’s eastern border) show more decisions to be made in Democratic races this month than in the Republican primary.

So what does Common Ground hope to accomplish? In short, the idea is for Democrats to stop filling out ballots in May that ultimately have few decisions to be made and switch to a Republican ballot, where their influence might prevent candidates from the GOP’s ideological fringe from getting elected.

In other words, is it better for Democrats to stay committed to voting in a party primary that has much less impact on the state’s future — sometimes on candidates who have no realistic chance to win in November — or is there merit in shifting to the Republican primary to help moderate that party’s controlling influence in the state?

Some Republicans hate this idea, no doubt. Asking Democrats to influence who wins Republican Party nominations sounds sacrilegious. But party primaries are often decided by so few voters, a dedicated group of fringe voters — ideologically speaking — can control the outcome. There are also thousands of Arkansas in the moderate middle who simply don’t vote in the primaries, not always realizing how limiting the decisions made there affect their choices in November.

All that, Hendren suggests, does a disservice to the tens of thousands of Arkansans a county judge, a state senator or a state representative will be elected to represent, regardless of whether they identify with any party.

It may seem like it’s gaming the system, but Republicans did it for years. Perhaps it wasn’t at the urging of some group hoping to moderate the state’s elected leadership, but back in the decades that Democrats dominated control of the state’s public offices, Republicans would often forego their own party’s primary because most decisions were happening in the Democratic primary.

Is it a viable strategy? It’s hard to dislodge politically active people from their parties. And the parties’ leadership want to do everything they can to make their party look vital and strong. They’re not going to advocate people jump ship, even for a better long-term outcome, because they have a party to preserve and protect. For the minority party, though, is it better to hold fast to principle, party and ideology and lose, or does make more sense to influence the opposing party’s nominees, so they’re not so, as some say, radical once they win office?

For political observers, the prospect is certainly entertaining. And if a voter wants government to be more about governing and less about partisanship, perhaps eschewing party labels in the primary could make a difference.

Will the idea catch on? Probably not immediately, but who knows in the long term? If it does have an impact, we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see proposals to end Arkansas’ open primaries so that only the pure bloods of either party get to select their nominees.

In the meantime, is anyone else hungry for dessert?