Democratic bastion bucks norms

Woodruff County again picks Obama as most of state does not

— Woodruff County doesn’t fit the profile: poorer than most, profoundly rural and 70 percent white.

No other Arkansas county with those demographics - not even Democratic strongholds such as Clay, Grant, Lawrence or Randolph - voted for President Barack Obama on Nov. 6.

In fact, those counties, along with 62 others, voted decisively against Obama, giving the Democratic incumbent just 37 percent of the statewide vote, slightly worse than his 2008 loss in the state at the hands of Sen. John McCain.

But Woodruff County - population 7,229 - which begins at the White River and ends at the western edge of the Arkansas Delta, voted for Obama for the second timeearlier this month. This year’s margin, 1,340 to 1,227, was slightly narrower than 2008’s - 1,412 to 1,206.

“It’s just an old-style Democratic county,” said Bobby Bowen, the county’s Democratic Party chairman. “We’ve been that way for a long time.”

All of the county officials are Democrats. The population is older - 18.4 percent are over 65 compared with 14.6 percent statewide - and set in their political ways, Bowen said. And the biggest town, the county seat of Augusta, has just 2,189 residents.

Bowen says the county’s residents have long memories.

“They remember what the government has done for them over the years. Some of them remember the Great Depression,” Bowen said. “I think you could have had JoeSmith or Tom Jones or whoever [if they were running as Democrats], it’s more of a party deal than it is Obama.”

Warm feelings toward the federal government are threaded into other areas of Woodruff County life, said Fred Swanson, a county justice of the peace.

Agriculture - soybeans, rice, cotton and corn - is the county’s lifeblood, and federal subsidies, crop insurance and other government agricultural programs remain popular, Swanson said.

Republican plans to overhaul Medicare and Social Security - or least the Democratic characterizations of those proposals - also played a role in this year’s election, they said.

“We have a large senior population in Woodruff County,” Bowen said. “The seniors are more apt to vote.With that large senior population, they’re the ones who over the years have taken care of those type of people. They remember how they’ve been taken care of. “They don’t have a 401K or pension plan. A lot of those people are basically living on Social Security, which is basically $1,000 a month.”

State Democratic Party officials also pointed to Woodruff County’s older population as a reason why it stayed in Obama’s column.

But other counties with demographics similar to Woodruff’s swung hard for McCain and Mitt Romney. Clay County - where senior citizens make up 20 percent of the population, where the Democratic Party’s Independence Day rally is still a major draw - awarded 63 percentof its vote to Romney.

The other eight counties that voted for Obama - Pulaski, Jefferson, Lee, St. Francis, Crittenden, Phillips, Desha and Chicot - have large black populations or substantial urban areas.

Why Woodruff County is different isn’t easy to pin down. Swanson and Bowen, both Democratic activists, say their party’s organization is stronger in Woodruff County than in other counties of its type. County and state Republicans didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Jay Barth, an associate professor of political science at Hendrix College and co-author of Arkansas Politics and Government, said Woodruff’s large senior-citizen population and its dependence on federal aid help explain its Obama preference.

But its remoteness also plays a role, he said. The county doesn’t have an interstate or major highway. U.S. 64 is the largest east-west thoroughfare, while U.S. 49 slices through the southeast part of the county.

“Woodruff is all about farmland. That’s really all there is. It’s the Delta meets the most rural area imaginable,” Barth said. “And it’s the kind of county with a really strong political tradition in a way that those places have that are really detached from outside political dynamics.”

In Cotton Plant, a town of 649 - 73 percent of whom are black - in the southern part of the county, Mayor Ronnie Conley said his town’s decisive 229-38 vote for Obamahad little to do with race.

“We just go by people’s message. We’re below middle class here. Obama’s message was ‘We’re here to help you. We’re not the millionaires on Wall Street,’” Conley said.

Yet race can’t be discounted, Barth said. Enough blacks live in the county - 20 percent of the population - that fewer whites had to vote for Obama to deliver it for him, he said.

“It really only took about 30 percent of the white vote,” said Barth, who is also a Democratic activist, based on an assumption that voters roughly mirrored the overall racial breakdown in the county.

Woodruff County has a long history of supporting Democratic presidential hopefuls, stretching back to 1972. Even in 1984, when Ronald Reagan easily won Arkansas, Woodruff County voted for Democrat Walter Mondale with 55 percent of the vote. The county gave Michael Dukakis 63 percent of the vote in1988, and John Kerry netted 65 percent in 2004.

Obama’s margins in the county have been markedly smaller than his Democratic predecessors. And the future dominance of the Democratic Party in county politics can spark disagreement, even among families. Tommy Swanson, the brother of Democratic Justice of the Peace Fred Swanson, voted for Romney.

As he sat with friends awaiting lunch at Rushing’s Grocery in Patterson, Tommy Swanson predicted that the Democrats won’t hold on to Woodruff County forever.

“We’ll be with all those other counties. We’re just a little bit behind on progress,” he said.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 12 on 11/23/2012

Upcoming Events