Trump Victory Recalls ’68 Vote From Arkansas

Old Yogi Berra once said, “It’s Deja vu, all over again.”

And so it seems after the Tuesday night March 1 primary elections in Arkansas. The night revealed a real mixed bag of votes from the Arkansas electorate.

Arkansans are ornery cusses, one out-of-state politico philosopher said trying to unravel the twisted knots of voting trends on the fly last week.

I say it is easier to understand what happened, looking back at Arkansas’ voting history.

In the General Election in 1968, Arkansans backed George C. Wallace, an independent, for president; re-elected U.S. Sen. William J. Fulbright (a Democrat) and gave Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller (a Republican) a second term in the Governor’s Mansion. Déjà vu? Maybe. We (Arkansans) are independent thinkers, would be more correct. Make that independent with a Capital “I,” that’s more like it.

The state split its Republican presidential votes by highly discernible thirds – a little more than a third for upstart Donald J. Trump.

Less than a full third to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

And even less than a third of the ballots cast for Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio.

The trio of Republican voters was well represented. Trump held the Outrage voters. You know them, the anyone-but-anyone-now-in-Washington-D.C. voters, or the-outsider-is-what-we-need voters.

The Christian Conservatives went for Ted Cruz. No surprise here. But maybe the biggest surprise is that the Moral Majority, the scripture-quoting, Bible-thumping bloc of voters is dwindling. Their Outrage Voter friends are siphoned away by the like of a Donald J. Trump.

And now to the GOP moderates, those children of the Reagan generation, the political insiders who knew that Marco Rubio, despite the entire second and third place finishes, believe he can still win.

Is there some degree of angst here?

Did you not think that between state Sen. Bart Hester and Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Rubio would win Arkansas Republicans? Well, he didn’t. His poor showing – 25 percent and slightly under 100,000 votes statewide – has gotten our governor in a political jam.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who posed for a soft- focus TV endorsement ad for the Rubio campaign in the last few days prior to the primary, wasted some of his precious political capital.

Those who supported Trump (and there are some who did and others who will now flock to the front runner) will now have little to do with Hutchinson. Those in the Hutchinson camp will scoff at this and say they didn’t know these folks before the primary, but that is not true.

Asa also shied away from his family’s church up-bringing and his Bob Jones undergraduate influence, to ignore Ted Cruz.

So now the Far Right can see the true colors of this moderate Hutchinson.

And Asa can forget an invitation to come to Washington to help in any Republican administration unless Rubio is president in 2017.

Let’s go back to Hutchinson’s wasted political capital.

He has even squandered that political capital in Arkansas for votes he hoped would be FOR his “Asa Care” or “Arkansas Works” program by paying only lip service to the campaigns of state Rep. Sue Scott of Rogers and others.

Scott was defeated by an extreme right-wing candidate last Tuesday.

District 95 is the loser because Scott was and is a good state representative. The vitriolic Austin McCollum will not be effective down in Little Rock.

State Reps. Jana Della Rosa and Rebecca Petty both survived hard challenges from the conservative right of the GOP. Each had the verbal blessing of Gov. Hutchinson, but little else in their races.

Proponents of the “Arkansas Works” that Hutchinson will propose to save the state budget, will continue to hope and pray he has the votes.

What will Asa do? Does he have the votes?