Category Archives: Elections

Casinos among best bets to make the ballot

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Where Arkansans practice pure democracy – we make the laws rather than elected officials doing it – is in the ballot issues. This year, those led by citizens could be a lot more interesting than those referred by the Legislature.

Here are some of the issues being proposed by citizens: casinos, medical marijuana, gay/transgender rights, term limits, limiting damages in medical lawsuits, campaign finance reform.

Here’s what you’ll be voting on courtesy of lawmakers: letting the governor retain his or her powers when out of state; increasing the terms of county officials to four years; and expanding the ability of local governments to fund economic development projects. Those are important, but no one ever got into a fight over the governor’s out-of-state powers. Well, maybe they did on Facebook.

When citizens try to place a measure on the ballot, the important first hurdle they must overcome isn’t gaining popular support. It’s having enough money to collect signatures and fight potential lawsuits. A proposed constitutional amendment requires 84,859 signatures. An initiated act, which creates a law, requires 67,887. To reach those kinds of numbers, it really helps if you can pay people to walk the streets with clipboards. So if you want to know which of those issues actually will make the ballot, look at the ones where backers who already have money are trying to make more of it.

At first glance, that would include the casino initiative. A group of investors wants to build three casinos, one each in Washington County (Fayetteville-Springdale); Miller County (Texarkana); and Boone County (next door to Branson). Attorney General Leslie Rutledge has certified the amendment’s popular name and title, so now it’s in the signature-collecting phase.

This will be the latest of many efforts to bring casinos to Arkansas. Most if not all of the backers of this amendment have been involved in one or more of those previous efforts. So far, those have always failed, either by not gathering enough signatures or not withstanding a legal challenge of some sort. Asa Hutchinson, then a private attorney representing the secretary of state’s office, helped keep one such effort off the ballot in 2012.

The arguments have been the same since Mississippi rolled the dice with its first casino in Tunica in 1992. Opponents point to the human and societal costs that casinos cause – the lost money, the addiction, the broken marriages. They call it “gambling.” Supporters say casinos already exist across the state border, so Arkansas may as well have some fun and create the jobs and tax revenue. They call it “gaming.”

And on the third side are Oaklawn and Southland, which race horses and dogs on the side while operating their own casinos. Thanks to a 2005 law, these feature “electronic games of skill” with digital versions of playing cards and dice. They don’t want competition and will spend their own money to fight it – on lawyers to try to keep it off the ballot, and on a political campaign if they can’t. In a good example of “politics makes strange bedfellows,” they work in parallel with family values groups to defeat the casino initiatives. So far, they’re all undefeated.

As usual, this year’s casino proposal would bestow on its backers a permanent monopoly enshrined in the Arkansas Constitution, which is a pretty good deal if you can get it. They and only they, or their designees, could operate these three casinos forever, with no one allowed to compete with them unless they also pass a constitutional amendment.

What else? A proposal limiting medical lawsuit damages has a good chance of making the ballot for the same reason that the casino gambling measure does: People with money would be able to make more money. Under that standard, the term limits measure – it would tighten legislative terms to 10 years – faces an uphill climb, but it does have a passionate group of supporters who’ve been working for a while. Medical marijuana has some momentum as a concept but not the financial muscle, and supporters are divided into competing camps.

What ultimately will make the ballot? The three referred by the Legislature are the only sure bet, but you could roll the dice on the casinos and a couple of others.

Donald Trump and Dale Bumpers

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The late Arkansas Sen. Dale Bumpers and Donald Trump have had two things in common: similar names, and their skillful use of a similar communication technique when running for their first major offices.

After starting the 1970 governor’s race in obscurity, Bumpers defeated the old guard in his own party, including former Gov. Orval Faubus, and then beat his obviously well-financed opposing party candidate, Republican Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller. The charismatic Bumpers frustrated his opponents with his issues-free, platitude-heavy campaign, leading Vice President Spiro Agnew to say in Fort Smith that he offered little more than “a smile and a shoeshine,” as recounted by the Arkansas Times’ Ernie Dumas.

Bumpers is hardly the only elected official to rely on broad themes rather than specific policy proposals, and this is not a criticism of him. The American people look for big ideas and shared values knowing that political candidates can’t or won’t keep their campaign promises, anyway.

And that brings us to Trump. The other night, Scott Adams, the creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip, told TV host Bill Maher that, far from being the shoot-from-the-hip buffoon that a lot of intellectuals think he is, Trump is actually a master persuader who will beat Hillary Clinton in the fall.

Adams, a trained hypnotist and student of persuasion, recognizes some of the communication techniques Trump is using.

One of those techniques D-Trump is using is the same one used by D-Bump in that 1970 race: vagueness. Like Bumpers then, Trump speaks often in generalities – we’re going to start winning at these trade deals, we’re going to make America great again – which gives opponents fewer targets. As Adams earlier told Reason magazine, “Sometimes you want to tell the story in a way that lets people fill in the blanks with whatever would make them the happiest.”

Why put so much stock in Adams, a comic strip artist? Because he first predicted Trump would win on Aug. 13, 2015. That’s back when the other 16 Republican candidates and their high-paid political consultants either were expecting Trump to flame out, or they were building their strategies around being the last candidate standing against him. It’s back when Nate Silver, who everybody in the political world thought was some kind of data-driven prophet because he correctly predicted all 50 states in 2012, was saying Trump had little mathematical chance.

And it’s about the time when, after Trump insulted Sen. John McCain and other prisoners of war by saying he likes people who weren’t captured, I wrote dismissively, “So that’s probably enough about Donald Trump.”

Before a mob of Arkansas Democrats attack, let’s be clear that “vagueness” may be the only similarity between the early Bumpers candidacies and Trump’s current one. For example, Bumpers avoided insulting his opponents, at which Trump is quite good. Adams says that when Trump started calling Jeb Bush “low energy,” it effectively stuck to him partly because that’s a new insult in the political world. Now he’s helping shape public opinion by referring to Clinton again and again as “crooked Hillary.”

Adams isn’t just saying Trump, who wrote, “The Art of the Deal,” is good at this persuasion stuff. He told Maher that Trump is “taking a flamethrower to a stick fight. There’s nobody using the same tools he’s using.” Among those tools is “anchoring,” or presenting something big and visual to give his audience something to think about. While others debate fuzzy illegal immigration policy, Trump describes a big wall. And when asked in a debate about his previous demeaning comments about women, Trump replied that he was referring to “only Rosie O’Donnell,” which made his audience see her and her personality, not him and his.

In the same way Nate Silver’s data-driven analysis was proven to be imperfect, so too can Scott Adams’ skills-based one. Clinton enters the race with advantages, including the fact that states with 242 electoral votes have voted for the Democrat in six straight elections, leaving her needing only 28 more to win. Every election cycle, the country’s demographics move in a direction more favorable to Democrats. And voters, after electing the country’s first African-American president, may still be in a history-making frame of mind and ready to choose a woman.

On the other hand, that’s the same kind of analysis that led people, including me, to dismiss Trump before, until he closed the deal on the Republican nomination.

Related:
Trump played checkers and they played chess – in a checkers year
What Dale Bumpers was

Libertarians, Greens better choice than death

Hand with ballot and boxBy Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The first line of an actual recent obituary reads, “Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond (Virginia) chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the age of 68.”

If only she had known she had other choices.

Those would include the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and assorted others.

Let’s focus this column on the Libertarians, Arkansas’ most active third party. If you’re not familiar, it’s the one that says it’s for less government and actually, really, really means it. The Libertarians would cut social programs, including the popular ones, and they support gun rights. But cutting government also means shrinking the military, and they also would remove government from people’s personal decisions, which means they’d legalize marijuana and end the drug war. The party’s chairman in Arkansas, economist Dr. Michael Pakko, describes the party as a combination of small government constitutionalists, anarchists who want virtually no government, and “minanarchists” who fall somewhere in between.

The Libertarians this year are running 23 candidates in Arkansas, including likable party veteran Frank Gilbert for U.S. Senate and candidates in all four congressional races: Mark West in the 1st District; Chris Hayes in the 2nd; Steve Isaacson in the 3rd; and Kerry Hicks in the 4th.(Democrats could muster a candidate only in the 2nd District.) Eleven Libertarians are running for the state Legislature. And the party is doing this despite the fact that, under a law passed by Republicans and Democrats, it had to select its candidates a year before the election.

For Libertarians, this year represents the party’s best hope to ever make a splash. Their two-time presidential candidate, former Republican New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, won only 1.5 percent of the vote in Arkansas in 2012, but a recent Fox News poll showed him with 10 percent support in a hypothetical matchup with Trump and Clinton, and his running mate, former Republican Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, is an effective fundraiser.

The Libertarians won’t get 10 percent. Republicans and Democrats are highly skilled at painting each other as so terrible that many voters will decide they must pick one to save the country from the other. So don’t look for the United States to produce its third President Johnson.

But if Johnson can win 3 percent of the vote in Arkansas, it would be a big win for the state party. That’s the threshold it needs to qualify for the ballot in 2018 without having to collect 10,000 voter signatures, a task that Pakko said cost $34,000 this year as well as a lot of legwork.

How doable is 3 percent? The Libertarians’ top vote-getter in 2014, Hayes, won 6.36 percent in the treasurer’s race. Some conservative Republicans won’t vote for Trump, and they’re certainly not going to vote for Clinton, so they’re looking for an alternative. Gilbert said some Republicans won’t forgive Gov. Asa Hutchinson and legislative Republicans for Arkansas Works, which is the state program that uses Obamacare dollars to purchase private health insurance for Arkansans with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Meanwhile, maybe the Libertarian nominee could pull votes from disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters who see Clinton as part of the problem. Some Sanders voters will vote for the Green Party candidate, presumably Jill Stein, who won .9 percent of the Arkansas vote in 2012.

If the Libertarians do win 3 percent, the next question is, so what? Probably the party takes more votes from the Republicans than the Democrats, but that won’t matter in most races in a state as red as this one is becoming. Libertarians are a long way from actually winning races for important offices. The party wants a much smaller government than most Arkansans would support. To win, Libertarians would have to moderate, but if they do that, would they become what they’re fighting against?

For now, Libertarians, Greens, and other parties offer this – a choice, one that Mary Anne Noland’s son, who wrote her obituary in honor of her sense of humor, didn’t take into account.

Related: Trump played checkers and they played chess – in a checkers year

Looking on the bright side in 2016

Hand with ballot and boxBy Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

This presidential election is producing two major party nominees with extremely high unfavorable ratings. You’re probably either a big fan of either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, or you dislike them both a lot. If you’re part of that large latter group, you might think this presidential election is a disaster.

What if it’s not? Is it possible to lament this year’s results and still see the good in this year’s process? Yes.

The American political system in recent decades has grown stale, with both parties offering cliched, uncreative arguments designed more to appeal to special interest groups than to solve problems. Important issues – such as how the global economy is affecting America’s lower middle class – haven’t really fit into the script. No wonder so many voters have dropped out or never dropped in.

Say what you will about Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, but they don’t read off a script. And thanks to them, the campaign is largely about often-ignored issues such as income inequality, crony capitalism, campaign finance reform, and the fact that the global economy produces both winners and losers. Trump has shown that a candidate can speak like an actual person by refusing to bow to political correctness. Sanders has offered big government prescriptions without pretending that he’s not – which means that at least he’s honest about it – and he’s showing that strong convictions, sincerely expressed, can inspire a lot of voters and small donors.

Importantly, Trump and Sanders have shown that elections can be decided by actual voters, not big money or the party establishment, each of which dislikes them both. They’ve done this in part by attracting millions of new voters to the process: Trump, disaffected blue collar workers; and Sanders, young people. While Jeb Bush, the anointed one, and his allies spent $130 million to no effect, Trump won his party’s nomination through his use of the media and social media, both of which cost candidates very little. Sanders is competing well with Clinton through small donations given by average people.

Moreover, the next few months could inspire Americans to seriously consider their political alternatives. It’s possible – though unlikely – that conservatives will rally behind a third party or independent candidate. The small-government Libertarian Party likely again will nominate former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, a legitimate candidate. Americans who want 40 choices in the cereal aisle may finally be open to more than two at the ballot box.

Finally, this election – and the past two – have reflected American diversity like none before. After eight years of having our first African-American president, Americans may next give that job to a female – 96 years after women finally attained the right to vote. Two of the four leading Republican vote-getters, Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio, are the sons of Latino immigrants. Sanders is Jewish. Dr. Ben Carson advanced farther than any African-American has ever advanced in a Republican primary.

Let’s not discount that this election has produced much divisiveness and two major party nominees many of us don’t support. At times, it’s been extremely discouraging for voters like me. I voted for Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

But let’s also not ignore the rest of the truth. This campaign has upset a status quo that needs to be upset, inspired millions of people who previously didn’t vote, shown that voters aren’t complete hostages to big money and the party establishments, and celebrated America’s diversity by producing diverse candidates.

Same-old, same-old will not solve America’s problems. Maybe in 2020, a plain-speaking, budget-balancing problem-solver can apply lessons learned from Trump and Sanders.

Of course, in my opinion, we had that in Kasich. But he lost. So God bless America. This is the system we have, and the people are speaking – loudly. It’s imperfect but seldom disastrous. In world history, most people would trade theirs for ours.

Feel better?

Related: Trump played checkers and they played chess in a checkers year.

Return of the Democrats?

Conner Eldridge is running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Sen. John Boozman.

Conner Eldridge is running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Sen. John Boozman.

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The last eight years have been really bad for Arkansas Democrats. The last few months have been a little better.

Democrats controlled Arkansas politics for 140 years. As late as 2008, the party controlled five of the state’s six congressional offices, all seven statewide constitutional offices, 27 of the 35 state Senate seats, and 75 of the 100 state House seats.

But they have fallen far, fast. After President Obama’s election, Arkansas did what much of the rest of the South had already done and became a Republican state.

Now, Republicans occupy all the state’s congressional offices, all seven statewide constitutional offices, 64 state House seats and 24 state Senate seats. In the last two U.S. Senate races, Democratic incumbents won only 37 percent of the vote in 2010 and 39 percent in 2014. Almost twice as many Arkansans voted in the March 1 Republican presidential primary (410,920) as voted in the Democratic primary (221,010). Democrats could not field a candidate in three of the four congressional races and do not have enough candidates in state legislative races to win back a majority, even if they win every race they are contesting.

In 1960, New York transplant Winthrop Rockefeller hosted a “Party for Two Parties” at Winrock Farms in hopes of building the almost nonexistent Republican Party into a viable contender. At times these past eight years, I’ve wondered if we’re going to need another one of those parties.

But Arkansas Democrats have had at least three bright spots lately.

One, they’ve got a young, energetic U.S. Senate candidate, former U.S. Attorney Conner Eldridge. He’ll have a tough time unseating the Republican, Sen. John Boozman. But he’s running an aggressive campaign.

Second, the presidential race is shaping up about as well as Democrats could hope: former Arkansas first lady Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. He’s brought new people to the Republicans but also split the party, which will not completely unite behind him. President Obama won 37 percent of the vote in Arkansas in 2012. That’s consistent with the percentages those incumbent senators won in 2010 and 2014, so it’s not certain Clinton will do better. But at least Trump gives Democrats a target.

Finally, Democrats at the state level, who sometimes have been behaving as if they hope things will just get back to “normal,” have been acting a little more like a vigorous minority lately.

I’ll try to make this brief. In the fiscal session that just ended at the State Capitol, the big issue was Arkansas Works, the program that uses federal Medicaid dollars to purchase private health insurance for a quarter of a million Arkansans. It had passed by large majorities in a recent special session, but it fell just short of the three-fourths needed in both the House and Senate for funding during the fiscal session. Under the Arkansas Constitution, nine senators can kill funding for any program, and this time, 10 Republicans were determined to stop Arkansas Works.

However, the Arkansas Constitution also contains a provision requiring that the first item that must be passed in a session is the general appropriations, which funds expenditures such as legislators’ reimbursements. Democrats in the House decided to hold that up until Arkansas Works was passed.

After much maneuvering by Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Arkansas Works was funded. Because he practically staked his governorship on it, it’s debatable how much of an effect the Democrats’ effort had. But at the very least, it was a reminder that 35 House Democrats can throw as much of a monkey wrench in the proceedings as 10 Republican senators can.

As a party, Democrats tend to support more government activity to help lower income people, so Arkansas Works would seem to be an appropriate issue for them to fight for, or at least stand with the big guy doing the fighting. Now they are coalescing behind another issue they think is a good fit, more funding for pre-K education.

That’s a better strategy than waiting for their majority to return, which isn’t going to happen any time soon. Two parties are better than one, and if you’re going to be a minority, you might as well be a vigorous one, Rockefeller would say.

Related: How Conner Eldridge thinks he can win.