Anyone looking for insight into Arkansas politics from last week's primary elections got at best a partial sense of Arkansans' state of mind.
That's because only a fraction of the state's registered voters bothered to vote in this year's primaries.
Low turnout isn't unusual. But this primary turnout was the worst in 10 years, despite an ever-increasing number of registered voters in Arkansas.
The unofficial 2018 primary turnout, according to the secretary of state's office, was a whopping 18.67 percent. Fewer than one in five of the state's 1.74 million registered voters cared enough to cast a ballot.
Altogether, 326,057 people voted early or on Election Day, choosing from Democratic, Republican or nonpartisan ballots.
What did they have to say?
The nasty three-way race for a nonpartisan seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court attracted the most voters. More than 305,000 voters weighed in to narrow the field to two candidates who will meet in a November runoff.
Arkansas Court of Appeals Judge Kenneth Hixson was the odd man out in that election. Supreme Court Justice Courtney Goodson led the balloting with just more than 37 percent of the vote to lawyer David Sterling's 34.2 percent. Hixson got 28.7 percent.
Interestingly, their combined vote total was 305,486, or 20,571 fewer voters than turned out overall.
Did these other voters not care about the Supreme Court race? Or were they perhaps so turned off by the ugly campaigns that they couldn't vote for any of the candidates?
Dark-money ads flooded the airwaves and voters' mailboxes before the election. Hixson attracted negative advertising, but Goodson was the primary target, as she had been two years ago when she unsuccessfully sought the position of chief justice.
Expect the attack ads to continue until November, when the nonpartisan runoff will finally take place alongside the general election.
A side note to Arkansas voters: We brought this long separation between the nonpartisan judicial primary and its runoff on ourselves. It was part of the constitutional amendment voters approved back in 2000 to revise the judicial article of the Arkansas Constitution. It needs to be re-examined, including whether this state should continue to elect its judges.
But, back to this last election and what it might have shown about the partisan elections that also took place.
Voters in both the Republican and Democratic primaries had choices for governor, which was the only statewide race other than for the Supreme Court seat.
It is in the comparison of votes cast for governor that the continuing Arkansas preference toward Republicans is best revealed. More than 100,000 more voters cast Republican ballots than Democratic ballots.
Incumbent Gov. Asa Hutchinson received 143,228 votes against his Republican challenger, Jan Morgan, a gun-range owner who got 62,553 votes. Hutchinson picked up 69.6 percent of the Republican vote. That's not surprising, given he is a popular incumbent in a re-election bid.
Meanwhile, what was happening in the Democratic primary?
Jared Henderson, a former Teach for America executive, similarly won his party's nomination easily with 63.29 percent of the Democratic vote over rival Leticia Sanders, a hair braider. But Henderson's vote count was 66,672, which is less than half as many votes as Hutchinson got in his primary.
Hutchinson's winning vote count was more than double Henderson's win total, which is relevant only to illustrate how differently each begins the general election race. Although Henderson is gaining name recognition, he is still a relative unknown against an incumbent governor whose political identity stretches decades longer than his tenure in this office.
In the only other race that has drawn much attention, state Rep. Clarke Tucker easily outdistanced three other Democrats to secure the nomination for 2nd District congressman.
Although there are other congressional contests coming up, the 2nd District presumably offers the best chance for a Democrat to upset one of the Republican incumbents now representing the state.
Tucker picked up 57.8 percent of the primary vote but that was just 23,199 votes in a primary race that counted only 40,117 overall votes.
Remember, too, this was in heavily populated central Arkansas. Yet, a congressional race attracted barely more than 40,000 Democratic voters.
That can't be encouraging for Democrats trying to upend the Republican, U.S. Rep. French Hill, in his bid for re-election.
But it is only May. There's time enough for all sorts of shifts before the general election in November.
Who knows? Maybe someone will find a way to engage the silent 80-plus percent of registered voters who didn't vote this last time around.
Commentary on 05/30/2018