Electoral hooky
State gets mixed marks for 2022
SPEAKING of voters in Arkansas . . . . The state’s mark for election attendance is in, and it’s a good news/bad news sort of thing.
Good news? Arkansans improved on the previous two midterm elections; one of eight states to do so.
Bad? Just 50.8 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in November, according to the certified results released by Secretary of State John Thurston. That’s up from 50.43 percent in 2014 and 50.38 percent in 2018.
When it comes to participating in elections, Arkansas gets a “satisfactory” with room for improvement. While it’s discouraging that just half of eligible Arkansans cast a ballot, perspective is in order. The percentage of eligible American voters participating in the midterms has failed to reach 50 percent each cycle since 2000 with the 2022 midterms at 46 percent, per the Associated Press and the U.S. Elections Project.
Voting in presidential election years, meanwhile, has topped 50 percent fairly comfortably in each of the last six cycles with a high of 66 percent in 2020.
Back home, Montgomery County turned in the highest percentage of ballot casters in November, 62.3 percent, while Crittenden brought up the rear at 33.3 percent. Pulaski County, the state’s largest, delivered an E-for-effort 51.8 percent.
None of the statewide constitutional offices were close, despite some Arkansans convincing themselves they would be. Governor-elect Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the first woman to be elected governor in Arkansas, won with 63 percent of the vote. That mark represents the highest percentage for a first-term governor since favorite son Bill Clinton in 1978, the paper reports. (Do we have a favorite daughter on our hands?) The mark tops her predecessor, Asa Hutchinson, who raked in 55.4 percent of the vote in 2014, and even her father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, who won with 59.7 percent in 1998.
Land Commissioner Tommy Land either was the most popular candidate in Arkansas, his base of family and friends the largest, or his surname too delicious a ballot temptation to resist. Mr. Land won election with 68.8 percent of the vote, receiving the most votes (611,719) of any candidate in the state.
Not only did the state GOP increase supermajorities in each chamber of the Legislature, all its candidates for constitutional offices were elected with ease. No statewide or federal GOP candidate failed to achieve at least 60 percent of the vote.
A deep shade of red Arkansas remains. If Democrats want to expand the palette, they may want to go to work on that 50 percent of the electorate that keeps playing hooky.