The numbers game

Ican’t tell you right now what I’d like to tell you. How’s that for a lead? What I can tell you is that you ought to watch or record this morning the regular Sunday edition of Talk Business and Politics, to be broadcast at 9:30 a.m. on KATV in Little Rock, 10 a.m. on KAIT in Jonesboro, and 10:30 a.m. on KFSM in Fort Smith and Fayetteville.

Don’t bother putting on your socks beforehand. I suspect the Talk Business/Hendrix College poll findings that will be announced during this airing would just knock them off anyway.

I say that because I’ve seen the poll. I saw it because I was invited to provide some analysis in the recording Thursday of today’s program that I am recommending.

No, I’m not recommending its viewing because I’m providing analysis. It’s for the numbers themselves. They might reflect an interesting fluctuation—or perhaps aberration—in Arkansas political thinking.

I asked Roby Brock of Talk Business if I could publish the numbers in this Sunday-morning column. He said no. And

I get that. He and his partners paid for the poll. It’s their poll, their scoop, their likely national mention as a result.

But we agreed that a broader analysis of the poll’s subset of independent voters would be possible. So, let’s do that.

Talk Business began dribbling out the poll findings Thursday, beginning with Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s strong 62 percent approval rating and the revelation that nearly half the respondents believe the governor has timed the state’s coronavirus-related economic reopening about right. About half of the other half thought he was reopening too quickly.

So, with the poll’s methodology thus released, it’s public record by now that there were 869 respondents, most on Wednesday and all by phone text, and that 37 percent of them identified as Republicans, 31 percent Democrats and 28 percent independents.

What you must understand is that, while Republicans have indeed historically overtaken Democrats in party affiliation in the state, Arkansas has long been, more than anything else, an independent state, so much so that it’s sometimes called cussedly independent.

When it was one-party Democratic, as it was for decades, Arkansas was more accurately no-party independent with Democratic affiliation as nominal and default.

Beginning in 2010, owing to the state’s aversion to Obamacare and the broader nationalization of politics through Fox News and the Internet, two things happened: More people started realizing or admitting that they were Republicans, and most of those still professing to be independents began to lean strongly Republican, or become more liberal-averse.

Take the percentages as revealed in Talk Business’ last-week poll, for example. Combine the Republican percentage of 37 and the independent of 28. That gets in the vicinity of the 60-plus statewide routs Republicans have been winning in Arkansas since 2010—Mitt Romney’s over Barack Obama, Donald Trump’s over Hillary Clinton, Tom Cotton’s over Mark Pryor, John Boozman’s over Connor Eldridge, and Asa Hutchinson’s over both Mike Ross and Jared Henderson.

The question for today’s poll thus becomes whether those independent voters—who are decisive, it turns out—are leaning differently, if maybe only for the moment, because of the extraordinary circumstance of unease with a pandemic, economic fright, and trouble in the street over race and the police.

We know that Hutchinson’s numbers remain strong. One explanation is that governors still are not assessed on a nationalized scale to the extent applied to federal offices. Another is that, while not everyone agrees with every move and matter of timing by the governor in his virus response, he evidently has worked hard and responsibly, as demonstrated by his daily streamed briefings.

Working hard and responsibly—might that be an issue as well in Arkansas voters’ current assessments of Trump and U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, the latter of whom has chosen to align with Trump while evidently influencing Trump with his combative hyper-conservative thinking.

You might wonder: How do voters assess Trump for responsible leadership amid the current unease? And how do they size up Cotton at a time when The New York Times is firing an editor for publishing an essay containing the young senator’s extreme views of military deployment for police work?

I’ll be back Tuesday to discuss the data rather than twist myself silly trying to write about it without writing about it.

It could be that, by then, you will have heard a national news report about a poll from Arkansas. I can hear them now. Is it an outlier or harbinger? I think I know. I’ll tell you Tuesday. For that matter, I’ll be live on radio with Bill Vickery around 10 a.m. today on 103.7 the Buzz, and it’s entirely possible these just-revealed numbers will come up.

Just remember—you nearly read about them here first.