The Arkansas Democratic Party - A Few Thoughts
As anyone who has known me for a while - even if simply as an online presence - will understand, I've been residing in the state of Arkansas for about fourteen and a half years. When I moved there in the summer of 2010, the state's Democratic Party was usually more successful than not in electing statewide officials to office, held two US Senate seats, and supermajorities in both chambers of the State Assembly. In other words, compared to other neighboring southern states in the US that had long ago become solidly GOP, the Arkansas Democratic Party defied political gravity. The 2010 election was a sign that something was starting to change. Statewide office holders did fine, and Governor Mike Beebe won re-election by comfortable margins. But we lost a US Senate seat that year and we still had governing majorities but no longer supermajorities. Some formerly Democratic state politicians had changed their party affiliation from Democratic to GOP. And the population in the state s...