March 31, 2020
By Steve Brawner
© 2020 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
We’re experiencing first and foremost a public health crisis and also very much an economic one. Secondarily, but not irrelevantly, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is also messing up this election year, as Daniel Whitfield and others know too well.
Whitfield, 33, is trying to mount an independent U.S. Senate campaign, which is never easy under any circumstance but is nearly impossible under the present one.
Independent Senate candidates have between Feb. 1 and noon May 1 to submit at least 10,000 valid registered voter signatures. Because so many of those will be disqualified, he must collect many more. His initial goal was 17,500.
Whitfield last year laid the campaign’s groundwork and amassed volunteers. Two months into his three-month signature collection effort, he says he has about 4,500 signatures in hand.
But, married to a wife with asthma, he’s self-quarantined at home and unable to attend the events that would help him collect more.
“I was supposed to go to three different events last week in Hot Springs with the St. Patrick’s Day Parade,” he told me. “I had volunteers ready in Fort Smith, Eureka Springs, Rogers. I had people all over the place ready to go to these events and get signatures, and unfortunately all of them were cancelled.”
Whitfield will occupy the left lane in the Senate race if he can qualify. His major issues are Medicare for all, the Green New Deal and legalizing marijuana. He says Arkansas’ representatives should not support cutting Medicaid when so many lower-income Arkansans depend on it.
There’s no Democrat in the race because the only candidate dropped out shortly after the filing period ended, leaving the party with no chance to find a replacement to run against Sen. Tom Cotton. But Whitfield would get support from some Democrats. He says he collected 519 signatures at a rally for Sen. Elizabeth Warren and 189 at one for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, both Democrats who were running for president.
Whitfield says he’s not giving up. He received 327 signatures by mail Thursday from volunteers and says others have signatures they’re waiting to send. Voters who would like to see him on the ballot can download a form to sign on his website.
The coronavirus has caused other disruptions in Arkansas this election season. The state’s primaries occurred March 3 before this virus changed our lives, but there were a handful of runoffs around the state Tuesday, March 31, that were surely affected.
Meanwhile, other campaigns are reassessing their plans. Attorney David Couch said signature collection efforts to create a citizens commission for legislative redistricting are on hold. If collectors can start by June 1, they should have time, but who knows what the world will look like then? Melissa Fults, who is leading an effort to legalize recreational marijuana, told me her group can make the ballot if they get going by mid-May. Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott dropped his plans to ask voters to pass a 1% sales tax. The Batesville School District postponed a millage increase election that was planned for April 14.
The governor himself is seeing his plans affected by the pandemic. His main focus for this fall’s election cycle was to be persuading voters to permanently extend a half-cent sales tax for highways that’s set to expire in 2023. It’s still on the ballot, where it was placed by the Legislature when times were good. By Nov. 3, there’s a good chance we’ll still be in a recession, which is not an ideal time to ask voters for a tax extension.
We’re all living day to day now. To an unknowable degree, we’ll still be feeling this pandemic’s effects on Nov. 3. Hopefully the health crisis will have ended and the economy will be recovering.
As for the election process, we’ll still have one, though ballots might be a little shorter than they would have been.
Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.