One thing I'm pretty sure about is that U.S. Sen. John Boozman will get re-elected overwhelmingly next year.
He'll get about 62 percent of the vote and the Democratic challenger will get about 38 percent.
That's in the vicinity of what Boozman did to Blanche Lincoln in 2010, and what Tom Cotton did to Mark Pryor in 2014. It's what a garden-variety Republican is going to do on a statewide basis to a garden-variety Democrat.
Arkansas has changed into wholesale and entrenched Republicanism, à la Oklahoma, and there's very little that can be done about that for perhaps a generation.
Democrats hate when I say that, which is too bad.
I listened to them for the last time in 2014. That's when they had me regurgitating that utter fantasy that they were going to identify new voters and turn out an entirely altered electorate to implant Mike Ross as governor and save the Senate seat for Mark Pryor.
Partisanship must lie to itself. Commentary shouldn't.
People hardly know Boozman, because there's not a lot to know outside niceness. Polls consistently show that he is the senator who isn't there. But, come Election Day, he'll bear the "R," different from that bad old Barack Obama, and that's all that will matter.
What happens between now and then--some will call it a campaign--will merely put money in the pockets of political consultants and television stations.
The time has ended when clever Arkansas Democratic politicians could finesse their party's national liberalism by fashioning a different and more palatably centrist image in their conservative-minded home.
I once extolled that finesse, the straddle, as brilliant politics. It gave us Gov. Mike Beebe and Senator Pryor and Senator Lincoln and U.S. Representative Ross.
As it turned out, the tactic applied at the end only to Beebe because we still look upon a governor in a close-to-home context, not one poisoned by our state's irrational opposition to Obama.
But as soon as Beebe was retired by term limits, and Ross was pursuing that same old finesse to try to succeed him as governor, Asa Hutchinson was demonstrating that Arkansas was so newly Republicanized that even he--a three-time loser--could win.
Bill Clinton said to James Lee Witt, a perfectly fine and accomplished Democratic good ol' boy who got beat for Congress, that he doubted that even he--Clinton, that is--could win in Arkansas anymore.
I don't doubt it. He couldn't, not so long as he's married to that woman with those secret emails who was Obama's secretary of state selling out this country to the communist Muslim gay Kenyans.
So, in the context of all that, I am reminded that a fine lifelong Democratic gentleman came up to me at a holiday gathering last December--a few weeks after the massacre of early November--and said, "Can Democrats at least now run as real Democrats, since we're going to get beat anyway?"
I answered yes, but was wrong again.
Enter a 38-year-old banker and lawyer and recently resigned federal prosecutor--a young man hailing from Augusta and a farm background who now lives in Fort Smith--named Conner Eldridge.
He announced the other day that he will mount a Democratic candidacy next year for the U.S. Senate.
But he's not going to run as a real Democrat, but as the same old tired and failed finesser.
He rails against Obama's historic multinational agreement with Iran that threatens to make the world safer.
He fails to embrace the increasingly successful Affordable Care Act and says only that it is a distraction to keep arguing about repealing it because we need to change it instead.
He says he is opposed to abortion. He declines to embrace same-sex marriage except to say the legally plain truth that it's the law of the land and we may as well deal with it.
Arkansas Democrats will assail me for dismissing their chances and undercutting the vital two-party system. But actually I favor a vital two-party system.
I am no longer interested in what I once thought so tactically clever--the now-passé practice of a merely variegated one-party system.
Eldridge offers the Arkansas voters a choice between Boozman and an imitation thereof except that, if elected, the imitator would vote to install Chuck Schumer as his party leader.
The heck of it is that the Republicanization of the state has made the Democratic primary into a small affair of a couple of hundred thousand voters, one newly and heavily influenced by black voters and urban and college-town liberals.
That is to say a liberal Democrat willing to embrace this historically successful Democratic president--state Sen. Joyce Elliott of Little Rock, for example--could very well defeat someone like Eldridge in a Democratic primary.
And then get 38 percent.
But it would be a nobler 38.
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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.
Editorial on 09/15/2015