Time To Toss Around Some Polls, Tomatoes

Cotton Closes the Gap In Numbers Game, But Needs to Take Care

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STATON BREIDENTHAL U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, left, and U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton listen in May at a tour of a Little Rock company involved in development of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STATON BREIDENTHAL U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, left, and U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton listen in May at a tour of a Little Rock company involved in development of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Tom Cotton is ahead in the two most recent polls that deserve to be taken seriously.

I expect Democrats won't like that I include Rasmussen Reports' tally from May. Partisans argue that the firm's history shows a Republican slant. Well, there's not much to gripe about. Rasmussen gives Cotton a 4 percentage point lead that falls short of a majority. An earlier New York Times poll gave incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor an 11 percentage point lead, which nobody believed.

Also, a June tally by Magellan Strategies gave Cotton a 4 percentage point lead. It didn't show him with a majority either. There were some other polls, but they didn't release their questions and other data. Beware any poll that doesn't give you the questions when it hands you some answers. Pollsters like that got answers for Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.

The Real Clear Politics website keeps a rolling average of the decent polls so far. That tally shows an extremely tight race with both candidates well short of a majority. Its average shows Pryor with 45.5 percent to Cotton's 44.5.

Even in a race this close, missing the Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival on June 5 won't lose it for Cotton. Feeding the perception that he's hand-picked candidate of out-of-state billionaires, however, could.

The Pink Tomato Festival in South Arkansas is a quaint remnant of a dying political culture. It's the kind of regional gathering politicians had to attend back in the days of look-the-voter-in-the-eye politics.

It's a tradition, though mainly a Democratic one -- so far. GOP governor's nominee Asa Hutchinson not only went, he came in third in the tomato-eating contest. Now there's a guy who's learned a thing or two about running for office in this state.

You can make an argument there are better ways to campaign, although I'd dispute that. You can argue a busy candidate has better uses for his time. A better use, however, definitely isn't to go to California to hobnob with people who support you 100 percent already and whom your opponent repeatedly declares to be your owners.

Stereotypical mega-donors Charles and David Koch hosted a closed door confab at a beach resort. Cotton was on the agenda. Yeah, Pryor has held fundraisers in Hollywood -- but never broken with a long-standing Arkansas tradition to do it.

Modern Senate campaigns need money. I get that. Donors require ego strokes. I get that, too. Cotton has money, however. What he needs are votes. There were no votes in California. In addition, also note that much of the money provided by rich donors and spent on Cotton's behalf so far has been spent, for instance, on commercials that dramatize a certain unpleasant bodily function of a parrot.

As politicians, most billionaires are great businessmen.

Cotton doesn't let other people -- anyone -- tell him what he thinks. Anybody who's ever met Cotton can tell that. What he's really fighting is the perception that his beliefs exactly fit the bill for big GOP donors. So they picked him out as their U.S. senator -- not ours. The process strongly resembles getting picked for prestigious guard duty in the U.S. Army just because you're tall. Cotton meets the money club's ideological height requirement.

You can argue that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee's ads against Cotton are misleading and false. They are, however, damaging. The chief reason is because the committee is run by political animals, not businessmen. They don't have as much money to spend, but they don't waste it. The rise of super-rich mega-donors who no longer filter their money through the Republican Party may be a nice problem to have for GOP candidates nationwide, but it's a problem.

Speaking of problems, I'm more than a little shocked by Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss. He went to Democrats to save his electoral hide. Sure, it worked. Exploiting Mississippi's wide-open primary system was the only strategy that could win that runoff, too. I get all that. But a senior member of the U.S. Senate just decided that saving his own skin mattered more than loyalty to his party. And the GOP leadership is OK with that.

In effect, the GOP just told the rank and file that getting a Senate majority matters more than, well, representing the rank and file.

If a GOP Senate majority won't represent their own party members, who's it for?

DOUG THOMPSON IS A POLITICAL REPORTER AND COLUMNIST FOR NWA MEDIA.

Commentary on 06/29/2014

Upcoming Events