Category Archives: Elections

Huckabee flies the Millennium Falcon into the asteroid belt

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Do you remember the scene in “The Empire Strikes Back” when C-3PO told Han Solo, “Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1” and Han Solo replied, “Never tell me the odds”?

I bring that up because I’m about to play C-3PO to Mike Huckabee’s potential presidential bid.

Huckabee announced this past week that he is ending his Fox News television show because he’s seriously considering running for president again. If he runs, he’ll have to get past a lot of asteroids in order to win the election.

The Republican Party coalition is composed of at least four important elements: super-wealthy anti-government activists; middle-class anti-tax tea partiers; social conservatives; and business establishment types.

Huckabee, for whom I worked as a communications aide a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, has a history of policy decisions and public statements that do not endear him to the first two groups in that coalition. As governor, he helped create a government health care program, ARKids First, and helped pass a one-eighth-cent conservation tax written permanently into the Arkansas Constitution. Those aren’t necessarily bad positions, but they make him vulnerable to attack. The most important super-wealthy anti-government group, the Club for Growth, does not like him at all, and he doesn’t like it, either. In fact, he called it the “Club for Greed.”

Huckabee is solid with the social conservatives, and they will make him competitive in Iowa and other states early during the Republican primaries. But social conservatives are not as powerful as they once were in the party. One of their most important issues, opposition to gay marriage, is no longer the position of a majority of Americans. If Huckabee is the only social conservative in the race, he still might be able to find a niche and be competitive for a while. But if others, such as former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, enter the race, the vote will be divided.

The fourth member of the coalition, business establishment types, will be looking to support one of their own, a Mitt Romney or a Jeb Bush – somebody with a lot of money who can raise a lot more. And that leads us to the really big rock in the 2016 asteroid field.

Hillary Clinton.

Republicans have lost four of the past six presidential elections and lost the popular vote in one of the other two. They need to win this one, or it’s going to start looking bad. They had a shot in 2012, but the Republican primary process was awful. The candidates in a crowded field beat each other up for a year and forced Romney to take positions he obviously didn’t really support. The process moved him too far to the right and made him look like a flip-flopper.

If that happens again, and if Clinton decides to run, Republicans are toast. She can spend a year criss-crossing the country raising money before cheering crowds and looking presidential, while they tear each other down trying to appeal to the various parts of the coalition.

To prevent that, Republicans will try to follow the model from 2000, the last time they won an election following a two-term Democratic administration. As they did with George W. Bush that year, the party’s leaders will try to create a process where everyone coalesces behind a single candidate long before it becomes too bloody. The anointed will be someone like Jeb Bush, Romney, or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie – someone with the support of the two most important groups in the party’s coalition, the super-wealthy anti-government activists and the business establishment types. Those are the ones with the money.

I started this column by comparing myself to C-3PO for a reason: I’m just the bystander, while Huckabee is the one flying the Millennium Falcon into the asteroid field. Unexpected things happen in presidential campaigns. In 2008, Clinton was the anointed candidate following eight years of a president from the other party, and she didn’t win her party’s nomination. If she doesn’t run this time, it would change the whole dynamic.

Still, the odds are against Huckabee – probably not 3,720 to 1, but steep nonetheless.

Asa and Bret

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Two Arkansans from very different walks of life personify that old expression – Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson and Bret Bielema, Razorbacks head football coach. In this post-Thanksgiving column, let’s celebrate their achievements before returning to day-to-day politics next week.

Hutchinson not only tried again, but he tried, tried, tried again. Three times he lost badly in statewide elections – the last a 56-41 shellacking at the hands of Gov. Mike Beebe in the 2006 governor’s race. (Remember “Asa!”?) He faced good opponents, but he also lost those races because he chose to put an “R” beside his name instead of a “D,” when many other aspirational candidates simply joined the majority party.

For some reason, the former congressman, Drug Enforcement Agency director, and under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security really, really wanted to be governor of Arkansas, so he placed his name on the ballot again. Now 63 and about to turn 64, this year probably was his last chance to be elected. Naturally reserved, he seemed confident, relaxed and cheerful throughout the campaign. The swirling winds of history had shifted in his favor, and he knew it.

The dog has finally caught the car, but unlike the dog, Hutchinson seems to know what to do with his prize. He is methodically preparing his budget and determining who will lead the various state agencies. He’s been measured in his public comments and seems genuinely interested in uniting the state under his leadership – even, as columnist John Brummett recently reported, having a long phone conversation with Bill Clinton, whom Hutchinson prosecuted during the impeachment trial.

You have to add a few more “try agains” to Bielema’s situation – 12 in fact. The coach left a winning situation in Wisconsin to rebuild an Arkansas program that hadn’t yet recovered from the Bobby Petrino scandal. Thirteen times Bielema faced an SEC foe, and 13 times he lost, coming heartbreakingly close to victory against some of the nation’s best teams this season. Oh, yes, people were complaining – about Bielema’s throwback style of smashmouth football, and about the fact that native son Gus Malzahn, the coach many Arkansans wanted, took his Auburn team to the national championship game at the same time Bielema was going winless in the SEC last season.

Few are complaining now. Bielema’s style – both coaching and personal – seem a perfect fit for this state. He may be an Illinois native, but he was raised on a hog farm – yes, a hog farm – and he’s unquestionably one of us. Prior to the loss against Missouri Friday, Arkansas had shut out LSU and Ole Miss by a combined score of 47-0. The Razorbacks had finished one spot out of the Associated Press Top 25 poll. Has a 6-6 team ever been this good or this respected?

Arkansas’ future looks very bright. The Hogs are bowl-eligible, which didn’t seem likely a few weeks ago. They’ll enter next season with talent, depth, experience and high expectations. With so many other programs adopting the pass-first spread offense, blue-chip high school offensive linemen and running backs have to be placing Arkansas near the top of their lists. And just as Hutchinson did this year, the Razorbacks will continue to have success in future Novembers, particularly when the weather turns colder and the game becomes less about airing it out and more about grinding it out.

Grinding it out – that’s Hutchinson and Bielema. They tried and tried again, and then they succeeded.

Runoffs: More or less democratic?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

When I told Jill Dabbs that she should already have been declared the winner in her race to be re-elected mayor of Bryant, I was surprised that she disagreed.

Dabbs placed first in a three-person race with 47 percent of the vote. In Tuesday’s runoff, she faces retired fire chief Randy Cox, who won 41 percent.

To me, 47 percent is close enough, but under Arkansas law, leading candidates who fall short of 50-percent-plus-one avoid a runoff only if they win 40 percent and have a 20 percent lead over the second place finisher. So, in Bryant, and in communities across Arkansas, here they go again.

According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 73 runoff elections are being contested across the state. Twenty-two of those are mayoral races, and those should generate some interest. The rest are a variety of local races that will inspire very low turnout.

Most states do not have runoffs. The few that do are mostly in the South, where they were created because Democrats were the only real party, and leaders did not want winners with marginal support to win multi-candidate party primaries. That’s according to Dr. Charles Bullock of the University of Georgia, who wrote a book about runoffs. In other words, it would be bad if a candidate supported by 25 percent but disliked by 75 percent won because all the other candidates split the vote. In Arkansas, runoffs were enacted in the 1930s to keep Ku Klux Klan members out of office, Bullock said.

One problem with runoffs is they attract much lower turnout than general elections. Dabbs won 47 percent of 6,156 votes cast Nov. 4, but she could lose in the runoff if her opponent wins a majority of a lot fewer votes.

Which result is more democratic and reflective of the will of the people? You could argue either way. If I were designing the system, a candidate would win with 40 percent in the general election and face a runoff otherwise.

Before continuing, I should tell you that Dabbs and I volunteered together for a campaign to build a community center in Bryant, and I briefly volunteered with her first mayoral campaign in 2010. I no longer live in Bryant, and this column doesn’t appear in any Saline County news source.

I asked Dabbs what she thought about my position that Arkansas’ current runoffs law might be less democratic than some alternative. I figured she’d agree with me after campaigning all day in cold weather looking for people interested in voting again – or voting for the first time. Instead, she was pretty much pro-runoff.

“I think there’s a silver lining around this runoff,” she said. “I really do. … Any time you can engage the community to move the community forward and for the community to do better, good is going to come from that.”

Dabbs said without runoffs, bad incumbents would remain in office in multi-candidate races because the good challengers would split the vote.

What about the lower turnout? She said the answer is for more people to actually vote. Changing the law to suit the culture would just be giving into apathy.

“The fact that we have low voter turnout is not reason to change the law,” she said. “What we need to do is we need to figure out how to get better voter turnout. We need to change the culture of our country to go back to being committed to voting and recognizing that it’s a freedom that we all need to be exercising.”

Can’t argue with the last part about increasing turnout, though I’m not sure how to do that. Voters had more than two weeks to show up for the general election and a week to vote in the runoff. Maybe we could do like Australia and make people pay a fine if they don’t vote? Nah.

Anyway, the mayor who could lose her job because of the runoffs wants to keep them, and the journalist being paid to write about runoffs wants to see less of them. What do the voters think? We’ll find out Tuesday.

GOP’s timing was good … this year

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Here’s what did not happen on Election Day: The American people did not simply rise up and repudiate President Obama and give Republicans a mandate.

Oh, they did repudiate Obama, but the Republican Party’s big win was more the result of timing and demographic factors that worked entirely in its favor this year and mostly will favor Democrats in 2016.

We’re talking nationally, not about Arkansas. What happened in Arkansas was permanent.

Let’s focus on three big advantages Republicans across the country had working for them.

Our two electorates. The United States is now made up of two distinct voting populations. The one that votes in presidential election years is bigger, younger, and more diverse, favoring Democrats. Many of those voters stay home during midterms, when the leader of the free world is not on the ballot. What’s left is an electorate that is older, whiter, and more affluent – in other words, more Republican.

Second-term midterms. So far, seven U.S. Senate seats have shifted from Democratic to Republican hands, and Sen. Mary Landrieu is probably going to be the eighth in Louisiana’s December runoff. Seven or eight seats sounds like a lot, but that kind of result is not unusual for a midterm election when a president is in his second term and voters are becoming cranky and annoyed. President George W. Bush’s Republicans lost six Senate seats in his second-term midterm, and President Reagan lost eight seats. President Eisenhower, World War II hero and budget balancer, saw his Republican Party lose 13 seats in his second-term midterm elections.

Democrats on the defensive. This year, Democrats were defending 21 of the 36 contested Senate seats, including seven states won by Mitt Romney in 2012. Senators serve six-year terms, so these Democrats were elected during the 2008 presidential election, when they had the advantage, and had to run for re-election this year in a midterm, when the electorate favors Republicans.

The reverse will be true in 2016. Republicans, elected in 2010 when they had an advantage in the midterms (and also after Obamacare was passed) will be defending 24 of the 33 seats up for re-election, and they’ll be doing it in a presidential election year that will be more favorable to Democrats. In seven of those 24 states, Obama won twice.

Republicans will have one historical reality in their favor, and it’s a big one: the fickle American voter. We have a habit of letting one party control the White House for eight years and then giving the other party a shot. In recent years, we’ve gone from eight years of Clinton to eight years of Bush to eight years of Obama. The last time voters let a president’s party stay in power after two terms was 1988, when they elected Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, for one term.

Of course, what happens between now and 2016 matters. How will Republicans govern now that they will control Congress, and what will President Obama do in his last two years in office? Does Hillary Clinton want the nomination, and if so, will Democrats just give it to her? Are Americans ready to elect her, or any “her”? Will the Republicans beat up each other so badly during the primary process that the nominee emerges too bloodied to win in November? Will one of the two candidates insert their foot so firmly in their mouth that Americans can’t hear anything else they say? Will a well-funded independent candidate like Ross Perot emerge to upset the apple cart?

Those questions remain to be answered. This we know: In 2016, Democrats will have the advantage because it will be a presidential election year, and Republicans will have the advantage because it will be their turn.

What now for third parties, independents?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

It was a great week for Republicans. It was a terrible week for Democrats. And for third party and independent candidates, it was mostly more of the same.

I thought there might be a minor backlash against the U.S. Senate race’s negativity. Nope. Libertarian Nathan LaFrance and Green Mark Swaney each collected about 2 percent of the vote. Libertarians each won about 4 percent in the congressional races, except in the Third District, where Grant Brand won 21 percent as the lone challenger to Rep. Steve Womack.

The governor’s race mattered most to third parties because winning 3 percent would have qualified them for the 2016 ballot without having to collect 10,000 signatures. It didn’t happen. Libertarian Frank Gilbert won less than 2 percent, while Green Josh Drake won 1 percent. That means the two parties will have to beat the streets again in 2016.

Independent candidates – those associated with no party at all – weren’t much of a presence in Arkansas. No independents ran for state or national office, and only one ran for the Legislature, winning 29 percent of the vote.

If a candidate outside the two parties was to win anywhere, it would have been in Kansas. Independent Greg Orman, 45, a wealthy, well-spoken businessman, opposed Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican who has been in Washington so long he doesn’t even own a home in Kansas. Despite polls showing the race a dead heat leading into the election, Roberts won easily.

Voters tell pollsters they’re disgusted with politics as usual, and a record number identify themselves as independents. But they still vote with one of the two parties. The backlash always has been against either Republicans or Democrats, not both. Jessica Paxton, chair of the Libertarian Party of Arkansas, points out that her candidates won far more votes this year than they did in 2012. Still, in this state, the trend is clearly moving toward Republicans, not against the two parties.

Everything about American elections favors a two-party system – including how votes are counted, the way districts are drawn, the sorting of the country into red and blue states, and, of course, the billions of dollars flowing to the two parties and their allies. Major party candidates have an army of professionals helping them; third parties are all-volunteer operations. Realistically, the easiest path to political change occurs within one of the two parties, not outside them. An example is the Tea Party, which succeeded in moving the entire Republican Party in its direction, at least temporarily.

But independent and third party candidates should not be realistic. They should do what they think is right. Libertarians believe in reducing government to such an extent that they simply don’t fit into either party. Greens want far more environmental protections than the corporate-dependent major parties could stomach.

So what now? Mark Moore, who had hoped to run for lieutenant governor as an independent, has filed a lawsuit against a state law passed in 2013 requiring independents to collect the required signatures by March of an election year – eight months before the actual vote. Court precedents seem to be on his side. He believes independents could be successful running for local and state legislative offices if they have deep roots in a community.

Third parties must field those same types of candidates. Ideally, well-known, wealthy candidates who believe deeply in the Libertarian or Green cause would run for governor or Congress, despite the fact they almost certainly would lose. Those candidates are rare. High achievers usually succeed partly because they are good at calculating the odds and picking the right battles.

Greens and Libertarians must make two other changes if they want to make a dent in elections.

First, both parties not only struggle to raise money, but they’re also philosophically reluctant to do so. They need to get over that. If I’ve never heard of you, then I can’t vote for you.

Second, both parties must be more inclusive and less ideologically driven. On the plus side, they make it clear where they stand. Unfortunately, too few voters agree with those stances. If they want to win more than 2 percent, they must broaden what they consider acceptable, think more tactically, and try to appeal to more people.

In other words, Greens and Libertarians should start acting more like Democrats and Republicans. Which, many of them probably would say, defeats the point.