By Steve Brawner, © 2024 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
Let’s see what stands out about the numbers in last Tuesday’s primary elections, starting with the state’s only contested congressional race.
U.S. Rep. Steve Womack defeated a not-very-well-funded challenger, state Sen. Clint Penzo, 54%-46%, in northwest Arkansas’ 3rd Congressional District.
It was the kind of race Republican congressmen fear – a challenge from within their own party from the right. Democrats in Democratic states fear a challenge from the left.
Womack has been in office for a while, and he’s in a leadership position. He’s more of a traditional Republican rather than a MAGA (Make America Great Again) one allied with former President Trump. Where he really stepped out was when he publicly opposed the speakership candidacy of Rep. Jim Jordan, a Trump ally.
Womack was not the only member of the state’s House delegation who didn’t want Jordan to be speaker. But he was the only one who voted against him, along with a couple of dozen other Republicans.
That kind of thing will draw you a primary opponent, as all four House members knew. And primary opponents are dangerous, for a couple of reasons.
Low turnout
Primary elections draw low turnouts. This one was less than 21%, and that includes the one-fourth who voted in the Democratic primary.
In a congressional district with roughly 750,000 residents, only 66,264 people voted in the race between Womack and Penzo. The count was 35,740 to 30,524. They were separated by 5,486 votes.
A low-turnout election means a smaller number of motivated people can change the outcome. Moreover, primary election voters are more likely to be passionate and partisan. That combination means members of Congress can’t afford to inflame the base. With more money, Penzo might have persuaded some of those 5,486 to switch – or perhaps he could have persuaded nonvoters to vote.
Looking elsewhere on the ballot, we won’t spend much time on the presidential primaries, which were neither suspenseful nor surprising. Former President Trump won on the Republican side with almost 77% of the vote. President Biden won the Democratic primary with 88.5%.
Supreme Court races
The only other statewide races were for two Supreme Court justice seats.
The four-way race for chief justice was close. Justice Karen Baker led with 27.2%. She’ll face Justice Rhonda Wood, who finished with 26.3%, in the November runoff. Justice Barbara Webb was third with 25.9%, while Jay Martin was fourth with 20.6%.
I cannot get into the heads of the 319,198 voters who cast ballots, but these are low-information races. The candidates are nonpartisan and avoid commenting on issues so as not to prejudice themselves if they later judge a related case.
That means it’s hard for voters to distinguish one candidate from another, other than the word “justice” that appeared before the names of the top three finishers. Baker received 86,742 votes while Webb missed the runoff with 82,634 votes – only 4,109 votes behind.
The other Supreme Court race easily was won by the candidate with “justice” in front of her name. Justice Courtney Hudson defeated Judge Carlton Jones, 60.3% to 39.7%, in the Associate Justice Position 2 race.
Hudson is making a lateral move from Position 3. Doing so allows her to serve longer after she reaches age 70, when she would lose her retirement benefits if she won again. Jones was attempting to become the state’s first elected African-American Supreme Court justice – in fact, the first statewide elected African-American officeholder of any kind.
As a result of Tuesday’s elections, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders will appoint two justices when this term ends. One will replace Hudson in Position 3, and the other will replace the winner of the Baker-Wood race.
One last set of numbers: As mentioned earlier, only 360,287 voters cast ballots, which was 20.62% of the state’s 1,747,557 registered voters and 12% of the state’s total population.
The low turnout was regrettable but foreseeable. There weren’t many races, and the high-profile presidential contests were not in doubt. Furthermore, Arkansas is a low-turnout state. In fact, it had the lowest turnout as a percentage of the voting-age population in the last presidential election.
Speaking of which, we’ve got another one of those coming up in November. Maybe we can pass Oklahoma and get to 49th?
Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 16 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.