The primary returns were inconsequential, inconclusive or incomplete Tuesday night.
The Republican primary drew more voters than the Democratic. Turnout was horribly anemic overall.
Gubernatorial nominees Asa Hutchinson and Mike Ross won overwhelmingly to become more than presumptive. The expected congressional district winners did as expected.
The private-option form of Medicaid expansion remained at issue. Primary option architect John Burris of Harrison got into a state Senate runoff. Sen. Missy Irvin of Mountain View was renominated so that she may proceed to perch on the fence again next year.
Good government may or may not survive a Republican primary. Whether it can survive it was not quite clear from the returns at this writing. The treasurer’s nomination is still at issue in a race between a thoroughly qualified candidate in Duncan Baird and an abysmally unqualified one in Dennis Milligan.
Two Republican candidates for attorney general who competed to be more absurd in their allegiance to guns and disdain for Barack Obama, one of them talking of stand-your-ground laws and the other saying she woke up every day to think of ways to sue the federal government … alas, they wound up in a runoff requiring three more weeks of mad dashing to the kook right.
Amid all that cloudiness, the clearest story of the night came early and had nothing to do with vote counts.
Before returns began to trickle in, the primary coverage by KATV, Channel 7, and Talk Business filled time with separate interviews with the primary-unopposed candidates in the marquee U.S. Senate race—Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton and Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor.
Anchorman Roby Brock asked each a question: What did they make of the outrageous sums of money being spent in their race—conceivably more than $40 million when it’s all counted in November—and of the pervasive role of big money in contemporary politics.
There is a theme in this column. It is that this race presents a vivid choice, even a stark one. The candidates’ diametrically opposing answers to that question advanced the theme.
Cotton answered abruptly. We have free speech in this country, he said. People should be able to spend what they want and say what they want to advance their political interests, he said. But no amount of money would be sufficient, he said, to rid Pryor of the burden of having voted for Obamacare and the great bulk of the Obama presidential agenda.
Thus Cotton danced his usual two-step: He is ever-libertarian in his views, including that rich people can spend what they want, and not even a little uncertain about the rightness of his position. Second, his opponent is tied to Barack Obama and that’s all he wants you to know.
Minutes later, Brock asked the same question of Pryor. The soft-spoken Democratic senator, often given to flat or vague answers, spoke with some thoughtfulness.
Pryor said we need campaign-finance reform. He said he is concerned about the practical effect of the Citizens United ruling, particularly the unlimited and stealth nature of spending by out-of-state interests for advertising.
He said people need to be wary of that kind of big-money activity. He said the politicians need to be more directly accountable to constituents than that.
The point is not that Cotton is wrong and Pryor right, though that’s the case. It’s that there is a plain and substantive difference and the candidates have done voters the kind favor of making that difference unmistakable.
Meantime, the governor’s race got off to a fast start. In his victory speech, Asa Hutchinson called Mike Ross a “Nancy Pelosi protege.” About an hour later, Ross unveiled a new commercial assailing Hutchinson for, among other things, once being a Washington lobbyist.
This will be the first governor’s race since 1966 without an incumbent or clear front-runner. And it will be the most seminal governor’s race since that one, when the liberal Winthrop Rockefeller’s victory over segregationist Jim Johnson launched the state on a progressive era that seems now to be winding down.
Whether it grinds to a full halt in favor of an entirely new and uncertain era—that’s the plain question for November.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.