Democratic leader looking for recruits

FAYETTEVILLE — The new leader of the Democrats in the state House wants converts, but he won’t turn away allies if that’s what it takes to be effective.

Rep. David Whitaker, D-Fayetteville, leads a delegation outnumbered three to one. With 24 members of a 100-member body, Democrats in the House cannot stop a budget bill requiring a three-quarters vote by themselves.

Whitaker detailed his plans to cope with these long odds. The first step is to increase the size of the delegation at every opportunity, he said. Recruiting candidates is already a top priority even though the next election is a year and five months away.

Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College in Conway and author of the latest update of the book “Arkansas Politics and Government,” said Democrats must be able to win legislative seats in growing Northwest Arkansas outside of the liberal stronghold of Fayetteville.

Whitaker said another important step for Democrats will be to find common ground with different subsets of Republicans on different issues.

“We never would have stopped school vouchers in this last session without rural Republicans,” Whitaker said.

Vouchers and other such programs allow any public school student to attend the school of his family’s choice, including a private school, and take his share of school funding with him.

“Those rural Republicans listened to their school superintendents, who told them that rural Arkansas would get nothing from those bills,” he said.

Making a pragmatic alliance required coordination, understanding and agreement between representatives with very different constituencies to represent, Whitaker said. Most of the Democrats in the House come from the state’s larger cities.

“That kind of sitting down over coffee with people who aren’t in our caucus and stopping bad bills is the kind of soft power we’re getting used to using,” he said. “Deals were made. We didn’t ever surrender our principles, but we did let bills go through the Judiciary Committee, for instance, that were not harmful that we would have thrown up our hands about if we had the luxury of a knee-jerk reaction.”

Whitaker is doing much of what he would be doing if they traded places, said Rep. Mathew Pitsch of Fort Smith, the House majority leader for the Republicans.

“One of the things helping him is that we really are rated as one of the least partisan of the 50 states by the organizations that track such things,” he said. The partisan divide is not as bitter here as it is in other states, he said.

“If I were him, and this sounds almost simplistic, I’d focus on the quality of legislation,” Pitsch said. “I’d get together with his delegation and get some good legislation that 51 of his friends could support.”

FINDING ALLIES

There are other issues ripe for agreement with other GOP sub-groups, Whitaker said.

“One issue that matters greatly to rural lawmakers is the opioid epidemic, which is far worse in rural areas than anyone has admitted,” he said, giving an example of another possible alliance issue. “There are solutions being tried in Kentucky that could work here, and Democrats could support that.”

Another issue would be a state earned income tax credit, which amounts to granting a larger tax refund to low-income families, beyond the usual deductions. That has support among rural lawmakers, he said.

A special commission appointed to make recommend revisions the state’s tax code will take a hard look at sales tax exemptions, among other issues. Many of the exemptions are for farm material and supplies. Farming is central to rural economies. “They include exemptions on everything from wrapping for bales to the utilities paid on the farm,” Whitaker said.

Pitsch and Barth said the state’s Republican Party is largely unified, but there are competing interests within it.

“He’s right about how my district, for instance, is different from the rural district of a lot of fellow Republicans,” Pitsch said of Whitaker. “Mine has a lot of transportation issues with ABF and USA Truck based here, along with manufacturing.”

Barth said the biggest divide in the Republican Party right now is the “Trump/ Bush” divide between populists who are taking a hard line on issues such as “bathroom bills” with strict gender divides, and more traditional business interest to whom such a bill would be a liability for the state.

Whitaker is taking on a tough job, said Rep. Greg Leding, also D-Fayetteville, who held the minority leader position from 2013 to 2014. “I can’t imagine doing that job now,” Leding said.

“I had the advantage of being minority leader when it was almost a 50-50 split” between Republicans and Democrats, he said. “We helped elect the speaker too, and had a strong and popular Democratic governor.”

Democrats cast the decisive vote in the race for House speaker between two rival GOP candidates. Being minority leader under those more-favorable circumstances was still an exhausting and frustrating job, Leding said. Any major piece of legislation moving through the chamber demands all your attention.

“You can’t even speak just for your own district,” he said. “If you’re the leader, it is assumed that any time you speak, you are speaking for the whole party.”

SEEKING CONVERTS

There were 49 Democrats, including a Democratic-aligned independent, when the regular legislative session began in 2013. That number fell to 36 after the 2014 elections and to 24 after 2016 voting and some party defections during the 2017 legislative session.

Barth said Northwest Arkansas’ Whitaker is wellplaced to recruit House candidates in a part of the state vital to his party’s future. The region is the fastest-growing in the state, according to recent U.S. Census data. The Northwest Arkansas metropolitan statistical area, which takes in Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville, grew 2.3 percent between 2015 and 2016, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

Northwest Arkansas’ rate of growth is twice that of the next-fastest growing region in the state, the northeast region centered around Jonesboro, according to census estimates. The biggest concentration of Democrats, according to election results, is in central Arkansas. That region’s growth from 2015 to 2016 was less than 1 percent.

All three Democrats in Northwest Arkansas’ legislative delegation live in Fayetteville. The sole Democratic senator from the region, Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, has announced he’ll not seek re-election. Republicans will contest that seat although no GOP candidate has announced yet, according to the county’s Republican chairman.

Leding announced a bid to replace Lindsey. Whitaker said he has nothing to announce at this time on whether he’ll seek the Senate seat.

“Democrats need that win in that part of the state, the one that they keep looking for outside of Fayetteville,” Barth said. Fayetteville city is probably the most liberal part of the state, he said.

Besides Northwest Arkansas, only the widespread rural areas of Arkansas have enough voters to make a decisive difference if the Democrats made gains, Barth said.

MURKY FUTURE

Democrats didn’t give Republicans a race over much of the state in 2016 House elections, secretary of state records show. Democrats appeared on ballots for 48 of the 100 state House seats in that year’s general election, according to those records. Therefore, Democrats couldn’t have gained a majority if they had won in every House race in which they fielded a candidate.

Taylor Riddle, chief of staff for the Arkansas Democratic Party, confirmed Whitaker is taking an active role in party efforts to recruit candidates for 2018.

“He can answer questions about what it’s like to work in the Legislature, what to expect,” Riddle said of Whitaker. “That is the kind of question candidates ask before they commit to a campaign. He can give them the information they are looking for.”

He will not be applying litmus tests as he recruits candidates, Whitaker said.

“We need to focus on what we have in common, and I’m not going to twist anybody’s arm to take a stance on an abortion bill,” he said.

“Am I going to get some of my constituents in Fayetteville to want to sit down and have dinner with everyone I will try to recruit? No,” Whitaker said, adding the reluctance would go both ways.

When the battle lines can never be crossed on any one issue, you can never learn how many people on the other side would be your allies in a different fight, Whitaker said.

“You would be surprised to know how many conscientious, spiritually strong but conservative people are waiting for the climate to be right to come out strongly in opposition to the death penalty,” he said.

Democrats are going to have to listen to voters and help them when and where they can, Whitaker said.

“When you quit listening to people, they figure it out,” he said. “In my last general election, the AFL-CIO contacted their members in my district. The response they got was 50 percent, with the rest saying the Democrats had quit looking out for them. If you turn your back on people then, they turn their back on you.”

That is what got the Democrats in the fix they are in now, he said.

“It all unraveled in two election cycles.”