WASHINGTON -- From shortly after the Civil War until voters handed the reins to Republicans on Tuesday, Democrats have dominated Arkansas politics. Many of them are already looking toward 2016 for a comeback.
On election night, Arkansans gave Republicans the state's entire congressional delegation for the first time since 1874. Republicans also won the governor's office and the state's other six constitutional offices and added to their majorities in the state House and Senate.
Republican Party of Arkansas Chairman Doyle Webb said the size of the win shows that the state's conservative voters have fully rejected national Democrats.
"Arkansas has changed," Webb said. "Arkansas is a conservative state, our conservative voters are coming out to vote Republican. ... Arkansas is now a red state, it's now a Republican state."
But Democratic Party of Arkansas Chairman Vince Insalaco pointed to legislative races in which a few thousand votes separated the candidates as a sign that Democrats aren't finished yet.
"It's not as if it was this 70 percent to 30 percent clubbing," he said. "This is not the end of the Democratic Party."
Some state legislative candidates were within 10 percentage points of each other. Top-of-the-ticket races saw wider gaps, such as the nearly 150,000-vote one that separated Republican Tom Cotton from Democrat Mark Pryor in the U.S. Senate race.
The party in control of the state holds sway over policy and legislative measures. Of particular interest is whether Arkansas continues the private option, which uses federal Medicaid dollars to pay for private insurance for more than 182,000 poor Arkansans. The private-option plan barely received enough votes to go forward in 2013 and this year, and is opposed by many of the newly elected lawmakers.
In 2008, Republicans held one spot in the state's six-member congressional delegation and held 32 of 135 seats in the state Legislature. In 2010, Republicans won three of the four U.S. House seats and made gains in the state House. Also that year, Republican U.S. Rep. John Boozman unseated Democratic U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, 58 percent to 37 percent.
In 2012, the GOP gained control of the state House and Senate for the first time since Reconstruction and secured all four U.S. House seats. Republican gains last week mean that in 2015, the state House will have 64 Republicans and 36 Democrats; the Senate will have 23 Republicans and 11 Democrats, with one vacancy.
Some people have blamed President Barack Obama's unpopularity for the wave of Republican wins across the nation Tuesday, but Insalaco said he wasn't going to criticize the president.
"It is difficult, what else can you say. I'm not going to sit here and run President Obama into the ground. I'm just not going to do that. I'm chairman of the Democratic Party, but I do hope for when we can look forward to supporting Hillary [Clinton] again," he said.
Clinton, the nation's former secretary of state and former first lady, has not announced whether she will run for president, but supporters have been lobbying her to run ever since she lost the Democratic nomination to Obama in 2008.
Arkansas Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe said having Clinton on the ticket would give Democrats a better chance at a comeback.
"The polls have indicated she at least has got half the state going in," he said. "The roots are pretty deep."
In 2008, Clinton won Arkansas' Democratic primary with 70 percent of the vote, beating Obama, who received 26 percent. Clinton is a Chicago native but lived in Arkansas -- her husband's home state -- for nearly two decades. After Bill Clinton's presidential term, the Clintons settled in New York, where Hillary Clinton ran for and won a seat in the U.S. Senate. After Obama became president, Hillary Clinton became his secretary of state.
Many Democrats in Arkansas consider her a native daughter.
Several Arkansas politicians and political scientists point to Bill Clinton's election as president in 1992 as why the Democrats have stayed in control in Arkansas for as long as they have.
Beebe said the state has leaned Republican in the past few years in part because of voter frustration over the president's 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
"It was Obama, and it's manifested itself continuously since then," he said. "[Republicans] have recognized the unpopularity of the president, and they have done a good job trying to tie virtually every Democrat to that unpopular president."
In 2008, Obama received 39 percent of the vote in Arkansas, while his Republican challenger U.S. Sen. John McCain received 59 percent. In 2012, Obama got 37 percent of the vote, while challenger former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney captured 61 percent. In the Democratic primary earlier that year, little-known, poorly funded Tennessee attorney John Wolfe received 42 percent of the vote.
Once the president is out of office, it will be harder to tie Democrats in Arkansas to his policies, including the health care law, Beebe said.
"It would be more difficult for that story to resonate," he said.
University of Arkansas at Little Rock assistant political science professor Greg Shufeldt said a Hillary Clinton presidential run is the best hope Democrats in Arkansas have of regaining state congressional seats.
"If she is the nominee, that just potentially shakes things up," he said. "It just kind of throws off the standard trajectory that the state is taking."
Shufeldt teaches government courses, and has written about campaigns and political engagement.
Shufeldt called 2014 "potentially the last stand for Democrats" in Arkansas, especially as it has become harder to be a moderate in national politics.
"We're seeing, more and more, the sorting of the parties so there are not really any liberal Republicans any more and there's not really any conservative Democrats any more," he said. "It's not really just an Arkansas story. We're really just losing a lot of those moderate Democrats ... and moderate Republicans."
White Southern Democrats have been disappearing from Capitol Hill for decades. According to research from The Economist, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 115 of the 128 members representing the 11 former Confederate states were white Democrats. That number had dropped to 24 by 2010 and has continued to fall.
Last week, Democratic U.S. Rep. John Barrow of Georgia, the House's last white Southern Democrat outside of Florida, lost. In the Senate, Pryor lost, as did Kay Hagan of North Carolina. U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., is in a runoff that many people do not expect her to win.
Some people blame Tuesday's GOP gains on the national Democratic Party's swing left; others blame the process used to redraw political boundaries every 10 years after the U.S. Census. In most states, that process is overseen by the political party that controls the Legislature.
For 100 years, most Southern state legislatures were controlled by Democrats. Now, they're dominated by Republicans.
Ouachita Baptist University social science professor Hal Bass said it is too simple to blame Democratic losses on Obama.
"The trend was already well underway before Obama came along," he said. "He's been a marginal factor. He's been a tipping point."
Bass said the Republican tide has been coming for decades. He said that while big-personality Democratic politicians like Clinton, and former U.S. Sens. Dale Bumpers and David Pryor delayed it at the state level, Arkansas has been pulling away from national Democrats for years.
"Southern Democrats were always out of step with Northern Democrats, but they were held together as a party," Bass said. As memories of the Clinton administration fade in Arkansas, "the more normal thing to do is for a Southern conservative to vote the way" they do in other Southern states -- for Republicans.
In Arkansas, Democrats haven't won in a presidential election since Bill Clinton was on the ballot in 1996. Except for Clinton's wins and President Jimmy Carter's 1976 victory, Democrats haven't won the state's electoral votes since 1964.
Nationally the Democratic Party has moved further left, leaving conservative members behind, Bass said, while Republicans were laying the groundwork.
"The Republican Party has organized, it has learned how to compete in the South," he said. For decades in Arkansas, "you had to run as a Democrat because it was the only game in town. ... The presence of a viable Republican Party has encouraged younger office-seekers."
Bass said Democrats may snag some wins here and there when Republicans falter, but "in the long-run the Republican Party seems much more solid and in sync with Arkansas voters."
Former U.S. Rep. Ed Bethune, R-Ark., said Tuesday's election was 50 years in the making, starting with the 1966 elections of Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller and U.S. Rep. John Paul Hammerschmidt.
The two men were the first Arkansas Republicans elected to either position since Reconstruction.
Bethune served in central Arkansas from 1979-85 and was the state Republican Party chairman from 1986-88.
"We've made slow but steady progress for 50 years," he said. "This has been a long, long venture. It takes time for people to figure out what the parties stand for, it just does."
Bethune said it is "wishful thinking" that Democrats will reclaim Arkansas anytime soon.
"I'm going to provide a counseling service for all of my Democrat friends so they can learn how it is to be in the wilderness. I've been there for 50 years, and I know what it's like. They need help in understanding that they're not going to get out of this anytime soon and particularly they're not going to get out of it if they don't jettison the liberal ideas and break away from the national Democrat Party," Bethune said. "If people want to be involved in Arkansas and be in tune with Arkansas people, they're going to have to come over to the Republican Party, and that's what many people are doing."
Boozman, a Republican from Rogers, said Arkansans voted against Democrats, not necessarily for Republicans. Before the 2010 election, Boozman was the only Republican in Arkansas' congressional delegation.
"It's not over for Democrats. Republicans have to realize this is not a bunch of people who all of a sudden have a feeling that [Republicans] are doing a tremendous job. This is frustration," he said. "They are voting against the people that are in power now, and they want change and they want change in a positive direction, so they're going to give Republicans the opportunity to lead. If they don't do a good job, they're going to throw them out, which they should."
A section on 11/09/2014