Arkansas’ GOP analyzes loss

BY SETH BLOMELEY

Posted on Sunday, November 12, 2006

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Like a lot of Republicans, state Rep. Jim Medley of Fort Smith was frustrated with his party’s poor performance in last week’s election and thinking of ways to do better.

His party’s gubernatorial candidate, Asa Hutchinson, is a native of Northwest Arkansas, but Hutchinson didn’t get the boost he needed in the state’s GOP stronghold to compete with Democratic dominance elsewhere.

“In Northwest Arkansas, the big issue was illegal immigration,” Medley said, adding that Hutchinson kept pushing the issue, citing his having been in charge of border security with the Bush administration. But Medley said people weren’t sold on Hutchinson because illegal immigration didn’t slow under Bush.

Hutchinson led in 13 of the state’s 75 counties, mostly in Northwest Arkansas yet by slim margins. His largest majority came from his home of Benton County, with 58 percent.

Democratic nominee Mike Beebe won 36 counties with at least 60 percent of the vote, including eight with at least 70 percent.

The extent of the defeat was not missed by leading Republicans.

Gov. Mike Huckabee said, “We got thrashed,” and likened the Republican losses in Arkansas and nationwide to a “good ol’ whuppin’.”

Hutchinson himself called it a “huge setback for the Republican Party.”

State GOP Executive Director Clint Reed said the party is “bent but not broken.”

Huckabee took office as governor in 1996 wanting to expand the Republican Party in Arkansas. But when he leaves office in January, there will be fewer Republicans in key elected positions than when he became the party’s titular head 10 years ago.

There will one less GOP U. S. senator, one less GOP congressman, and two fewer state constitutional officers. All seven constitutional officers in the state are Democrats for the first time since 1992.

And, GOP state House members will have dipped to 25 out of 100, the fewest since the 1999 legislative session.

THE CAUSES Huckabee says the losses are in no way linked to his performance as governor and that he couldn’t have done anything else to build the party to avoid such large defeats last week. “Unfortunately, all the national issues fell all the way down to the local level, even to the state legislative races,” Huckabee said. “[GOP candidates ] were really swept away by the overwhelming tsunami water and winds that took a lot of folks out.” There were no competitive U. S. House races in Arkansas, and the state’s U. S. senators weren’t up for re-election this year.

State Democratic Party Chairman Jason Willett of Jonesboro said Huckabee’s attempt to blame Arkansas GOP losses on national politics is ridiculous.

“This election is about Arkansas,” Willett said. “We had a very good ticket, and without a doubt there were coattails with Mike Beebe’s leadership. What you’ll see is a cohesive approach across the board with our party.”

Willett took some criticism last year when he took out a line of credit to help finance party activities.

He said his strategy in raising money for the party helped the get-out-the-vote effort for Democrats, particularly in legislative races.

State Rep. Bill Pritchard, RElkins, said, “I think George Bush and Mike Beebe beat Doug Kuntz,” referring to the Fayetteville Republican who lost to Fayetteville Democrat Jim House. “The coattails were just huge up there,” he said.

Rep. Johnny Key, R-Mountain Home, said he didn’t see the party’s focus on issues such as illegal immigration, gay adoptions, and gay marriage as part of the problem.

“I think the attitude was anti-Bush and therefore it was anti-Republican,” Key said.

Huckabee also said some in the state GOP had become “spoiled.”

“I’ve been saying for a long while... we need to build a good farm team,” Huckabee said. “Also, in Arkansas, you can’t run a cookie cutter D. C. campaign and win statewide. I’m not saying any of our candidates did that. People in Arkansas are conservative, but they are also populist.”

He wasn’t sure how to explain it.

He said the Democrats may have done a better job with turning out their voters than Republicans did but he didn’t know that for sure.

He said most independents may have supported the Democrats.

Also not clear to him was how the election would affect his decision on whether to run for president in 2008. He said he won’t announce until after he leaves the governor’s office and possibly would wait until the end of 2007.

Huckabee said it was hard for Hutchinson to overcome Beebe’s long ties at the state Capitol.

“He [Beebe ] knew people in the political community,” Huckabee said. “He had political capital. In terms of people’s comfort level, that helped and it certainly helped with fundraising.”

Beebe, the state attorney general and a former legislator, benefited from Republican contributions, especially from business-minded Republicans.

“The business community knows that if something happens in the state of Arkansas or if there is big crisis, you don’t rely on just anybody to repair that situation,” said former state Sen. Bill Gwatney, D-Jacksonville, Beebe’s campaign finance chairman. “For years, the person the people in the business community went to to solve a problem was Mike Beebe. He’s taken care of a lot of the heavy lifting, and the state of Arkansas remembered.”

Former state Sen. Jon Fitch, D-Hindsville, said Hutchinson didn’t do as well in Northwest Arkansas because a lot of people “were tired of Asa Hutchinson. He carried a lot of baggage.”

Hutchinson, while a popular congressman in Northwest Arkansas for five years, also lost two statewide races before he ran for governor. He also held two posts in the Bush administration. And he helped impeach President Clinton while in Congress. Medley, the Republican state representative from Fort Smith, said ads on behalf of Hutchinson fell flat, especially the one with children criticizing Beebe, but also the one alleging that “crime pays” under Beebe. That ad tried to link Beebe to former state Sen. Nick Wilson, a convicted felon, but anyone who knows anything about state government knows Beebe and Wilson were enemies, Medley said.

THE NEEDS There need to be changes for the party to be successful in Arkansas in the future, said Reed, the state GOP executive director.

“We have to make sure our message resonates with mainstream Arkansas,” Reed said. “We need to be an inclusive party, not fractionalized with regional ideologues. We have to be a legitimate statewide organization.”

Opposing gay causes, such as homosexual marriage, helped bring out the vote for the GOP in 2004.

But Reed said anti-gay issues may help with the Republican base but didn’t help win other voters. He said the party may have harped on that too much this election year.

“We’ve got to focus on less government regulation, fiscal conservatism... bedrock principles,” he said.

Medley said that in the next election it’s clear Republicans should do a couple of things.

“We better have some real issues, and if we’re going to attack someone, we better be able to make it stick,” he said.

Ann Clemmer, a political science instructor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said Republicans in recent years have relied on key elected officials to build up the party.

Huckabee has appointed hundreds of Republicans to state boards and commissions, but too many in the GOP don’t want to do the grunt work, she said.

“We say we build a party from the bottom up,” Clemmer said. “But we’ve had it top down, which is not the way to build a party.”

Janine Parry, a University of Arkansas at Fayetteville political science professor who directs a poll on Arkansas candidates and issues annually, said Republicans have long complained about their historic disadvantages in Arkansas, especially before term limits.

She said GOP officials have liked to say that Arkansans don’t vote with the party that actually reflects their values.

But those complaints can’t explain the party’s weakness after one of the country’s strictest term limits laws has been in place for 14 years now, she said.

“Arkansans live conservative; we talk conservative, but we’re not ideologues,” she said. “Most of us are not single-issue voters.”

She said over the years, those surveyed by the UA’s annual Arkansas Poll point to health care, education and jobs or the economy as the state’s most pressing issues.

“So far we’ve talked to about 6, 000 Arkansans, and they keep telling us this,” said Parry, the poll director.

Yet, Republicans weren’t talking much about those issues, she said.

“At what point do you recognize that it might not be the state, it might be you ?” she said. Information for this article was contributed by Laura Kellams and Michael R. Wickline of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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