By Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

To get an idea of what will transpire in Arkansas this election season, consider what just happened in Ohio.

There, the state’s wealthiest congressional district held a special election Tuesday to fill a vacant seat. Ohio’s 12th had elected Republicans to Congress since the 1980s, and President Trump won it by 11 points.

The election pitted Republican Troy Balderson against Democrat Danny O’Connor, and polls showed it was tight. If the Democrat won, it would be seen as a big sign that the November elections might go that party’s way nationwide. This year is a midterm election, which typically favors the fired up party not in the White House – and Democrats are very fired up. Millions of dollars poured into the race from both sides. President Trump held a big rally there Saturday. 

They’re still counting the votes as of this writing, but it looks like the Republican candidate narrowly won the Republican-leaning district. Again, it was only a special election to fill a vacant seat. The two candidates face each other again in November.

Arkansas has one really competitive congressional district this year – the 2nd in the central part of the state.

We can already predict the future in the other three. Reps. Rick Crawford in eastern Arkansas’ 1st District, Steve Womack in Northwest Arkansas’ 3rd District, and Bruce Westerman in southern and western Arkansas’ 4th District will win. They are all incumbents and Republicans.

Those districts, like most in America, are not competitive. Americans in many places have sorted themselves into Republican and Democratic enclaves, and where we’re mixed up together, the parties have drawn squiggly lines to do the sorting for us.

For the minority party, campaigns often at best are about building for the future, when demographic changes and cultural shifts might make a race competitive. Asa Hutchinson, for example, lost three underdog statewide campaigns back when Republicans were in the minority, and now he’s governor.

A future example might be Northwest Arkansas’ 3rd District. Democrats cannot win it this year. But someday they might if Walmart and its suppliers import more out-of-state corporate employees, and the region becomes increasingly diverse racially and culturally, and the Crystal Bridges art museum keeps making its mark on Bentonville, and the University of Arkansas provides a liberalizing influence, as universities tend to do.

Arkansas’ 2nd District, however, is somewhat competitive now, and not because of the actions of its congressman, Rep. French Hill. He’s voted about like the other three congressmen have. Its largest county, Pulaski, is urban and has a large minority population, two factors that favor Democrats. On the other hand, those votes are more than counteracted by the Republican counties around it, including Saline, Faulkner and White.

Trump won the district in 2016, but his margin over Clinton, 52-42, was closer than in the other three districts (and was closer than in Ohio’s 12th). And remember, this is a midterm election, when Democrats will be motivated to vote.

Seeing an opportunity, national Democrats poured money into the Democratic primary to nominate state Rep. Clarke Tucker, D-Little Rock, to oppose Hill. He beat three Democrats without a runoff. Tucker is a lawyer who has legislated as a moderate and has a compelling personal story as a cancer survivor. He’s also well connected. His great-grandfather and namesake, James Paul Clarke, a governor and senator, is one of two Arkansans memorialized with a statue in the U.S. Capitol.

The very influential Cook Political Report has changed its rating of the race twice, from “Solid Republican” to “Likely Republican” to, now, “Lean Republican.” This has become a national race, which means national money will rain on the district. If you get Little Rock TV, you’ll be bombarded with ads painting Hill as anti-senior citizen and Tucker as beholden to Nancy Pelosi.

Like Ohio’s 12th, this will get a lot of attention. However, unlike Balderson in Ohio, Hill is an incumbent. Also, the Republican red tide in Arkansas doesn’t seem to have abated at all.

Given those realities, the smart money is on Hill. The Cook Political Report had this race right the second time – it’s likely Republican.

Of course, I said twice that Sen. Ted Cruz would win Arkansas’ Republican primary in 2016, and he was Trumped.