Ill-fitting shoe

It’s funny how the same shoe can feel so different once it’s on the other foot. There’s a lot of grousing in the Arkansas air and elsewhere about the disadvantages and injustices of being a one-party state, and gnashing of teeth from the deep-blue-left over the all-but-assured continuation of the Republican trifecta in Little Rock when November comes.

So-called “voting rights” advocates look at the current state legislative landscape — Republicans hold 78 of 100 Arkansas house seats, and 28 of 35 state senate seats — and see a dangerous “threat to democracy.”

Many Democrats in Arkansas feel like their votes are wasted, particularly if they vote their party in the primary.

“In the 2020 general election in Arkansas, 56% of state legislative races were uncontested,” whined activists Jeremy Gruber and Harry Kresky in a syndicated column this week. “Uncontested! Only 5% of races were considered competitive.”

They trashed states like Arkansas where “the winner of the Republican primary … almost always wins the general election,” blamed MAGA Republicans for “undermining our democracy” and claimed one party’s domination of a state’s political landscape “risks authoritarianism.”

Their big worry is that Southern and Midwestern states may move to closed primaries — like blue-dominated states such as Oregon and New York have employed for years to maintain partisan control.

Should this spread in red states across the South, Gruber and Kresky grimly warned that it “could spell a descent into authoritarian rule that we’ve barely begun to grasp.”

Heck, the two might rend their garments and swoon in despair if the anticipated red wave pushed those Arkansas legislative Republican majorities even higher, say to 89-11 and 30-5, after the midterms.

Those numbers are precisely the majority the Democratic Party held when Gruber was finishing college. If he ever wrote critically of them, Google couldn’t find such documentation.

Gruber and his ideological ilk personify the partisan problem of hyper-hypocrisy among Democrats today. And it’s especially problematic in states like Arkansas, where oppressive one-party authoritarianism didn’t alarm leftist voting rights activists at all as long as it was blue.

Loud complaints from Gruber about only 5% of Arkansas legislative races being competitive lose credibility when he was stone-silent about a zero percent rate of competitive races as recently as 2008.

Absolutely noncompetitive contests in 2008, 2006, 2004, 2002, 2000 and 1998 (according to FairVote.org data) in which the winners were majority Democrats didn’t seem to ever warrant commentary from Gruber. He certainly didn’t call Arkansas out as an example of anti-democracy authoritarianism during those years of Democratic Party domination.

Longtime conservative political observers in Arkansas can well remember it being almost impossible to find a place to vote Republican in a primary. And it wasn’t any use, anyway: the Democratic primary was the election, and if you didn’t vote then your vote was irrelevant. The November ballot was merely a printed formality.

Squeezing into an ill-fitting shoe that was once reserved only for political opponents isn’t comfortable. But Arkansas Democrats had decades during which their leaders and strategists could have realized that a two-party system “thrives when the parties are competitive,” just like Gruber now believes — when his party is the uncompetitive one being dominated in many Southern states.

It would be prudent for Republicans now to not follow the foolish domineering path Democrats took, and to pursue a long-term strategy that expands its own ranks and seeks to include more independents.

Another metric being lamented by the now-dominated Democrats in red states like Arkansas is low voter turnout. Again, while there is merit in the discussion that citizens should be encouraged to exercise their right to vote, high-decibel arguments from leftward activists ring hollow now after decades of quiet.

While the 54% of eligible Arkansas voters casting ballots in 2020 was the lowest of any state, it’s a vast improvement from the Democratic majority days.

From 1998 to 2008, Arkansas’ turnout never exceeded a majority, and was frequently well below half. Those percentages, respectively, were 28, 40, 34, 40, 37 and 39. Having 54% of the voting population approve an overwhelming Republican majority in state legislative and constitutional offices is a much broader coalition than 1990s and early 2000s entrenched Democrats could claim.

It’s true that the nature of partisan politics lends itself to hypocritical positions, and nowhere is color-labeling from pots and kettles more commonplace. But even back when an Arkansas Republican couldn’t get elected as dogcatcher in most counties, the ruling Democrats weren’t viewed as authoritarian threats to our system of government.

They weren’t painted as malicious to our freedoms or rights, even as they tenaciously enforced systemic practices (and sometimes fixed rules) aimed at preserving their dominance. That’s where the opposition party pendulum has swung too far.

Attributing un-American ill will to Republican winners should be out of bounds, especially from the party that previously dominated even more unevenly. The goal for Democrats shouldn’t be trying to figure out how to go back to 1992.

The larger lesson for all is that both parties need to build broader appeal to the growing segment of political independents. The party that figures that out first will serve the public best.