Category Archives: Politics

From only one party to mostly one party

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

They say it’s always darkest before dawn. After this year’s election, and the days afterwards, Democrats in Arkansas have to be wondering if they’ve reached that point, or if it’s still only about 3 a.m.

Republicans, of course, won the presidential election in Arkansas, easily won the U.S. Senate race, and were re-elected in all four congressional races, three of which didn’t even produce a Democratic opponent.

As of the morning after the election, Republicans had picked up nine seats in the state House of Representatives, giving them 73 out of 100, and two seats in the Senate, giving them 26 out of 35. In 2008, Democrats controlled 102 of the 135 seats.

For Democrats, that was pretty dark. Then, the day after the election, one of their own, Rep. Jeff Wardlaw of Hermitage, switched parties, and on Nov. 22, another Democrat, Rep. David Hillman of Almyra, switched as well. Republicans now have 75 of the 100 House members – a three-fourths supermajority allowing them to pass all appropriations bills without having to worry about Democratic objections, and they’re one short of having that same majority in the Senate. Another Democratic legislator is seriously considering switching.

Bluntly speaking, what’s happening in Arkansas is what’s already happened throughout the South: Rural white Democrats are disappearing at the state and national levels. With a dwindling number of exceptions, the Democrats remaining in the Legislature increasingly represent urban areas, or they are minorities representing districts with large minority populations.

Those remaining rural white Democratic legislators know they are faced with three choices, which sometimes are spelled out explicitly to them by Republicans in power: Switch parties so they can stay in office; decline to run again and leave office gracefully; or stick with their party and probably lose if they have a decent Republican opponent. Six Democratic incumbents chose that last option this year, and they lost.

The vestiges of 150 years of Democratic dominance will take a while to reverse. Democrats still control a majority of all partisan elected offices thanks to their strength at the county level. Those offices will turn over more slowly because they aren’t term-limited and because county officials have staying power. Democrats are pouring resources into their county committees because they know it’s where they are still strong.

But Republicans are making gains at the county level, too. According to numbers supplied by the Republican Party of Arkansas, this election Republicans picked up seven county judges’ seats to reach 25 out of 75, and nine sheriff’s offices to reach 21, with another candidate in Hot Spring County still to face an independent in a runoff. The party increased its number of justices of the peace from 248 to 295. Republicans now control almost 39 percent of all partisan offices in Arkansas, excluding surveyors and constables. In 2010, they controlled 11 percent.

For Republicans, this might be too much of a good thing. They’re not going to turn anybody away, of course, but party discipline is easier to enforce with a small majority of party loyalists than with an overwhelming majority that includes ex-Democrats.

Democrats, meanwhile, must figure out some way to appeal to culturally conservative Arkansans despite their national party moving in the other direction. Rep. Michael John Gray of Augusta, who says he’s running for the party chairmanship in March, said Democrats must focus on “kitchen table” issues, rather than more controversial “coffee shop” ones, and reclaim the spirit that existed when Roosevelt Democrats were seen as offering hope to the common man.

In the meantime, let’s all hope both parties expand their bases – certainly past geography and most certainly past race. One hopeful sign is that the newly elected county judge in Washington County, home to Fayetteville and Springdale, is Joseph Wood, a Republican and an African-American.

For much of Arkansas’ post-Civil War history, Democrats weren’t just a majority party but practically the only one. During those years, Arkansas was less a one-party state than a no-party state.

Republicans will not reach that point, but at the state and national levels, they are dominant and becoming more so. Democrats ran things for a century and a half. How long will this realignment last? Hard to tell, because the Republican era is just now dawning.

Every county is purple

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

For the second time in five elections, the winner of the popular vote was not elected president, and that’s OK, we’re told, because look at this map showing the United States is a sea of red counties with a few blue islands. What would happen if those blue people’s votes in California counted as much as everyone else’s?

No chart or graph ever tells the whole story. The problem with these maps is that they perpetuate this binary view of the world that dominates our political discourse these days. They imply that everyone in a blue county is blue, and everyone in a red county is red. The truth is that there are red voters even in the bluest of the blue counties, and vice versa, as well as yellow voters and green voters, too. Every county is purple, just in different shades.

So now we know that a million fewer Americans voted for President-elect Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton, just as Al Gore won 540,000 more popular votes than President George W. Bush in 2000. After two centuries where it usually worked out that the winner was the one preferred by the most Americans, the opposite has happened twice in the last five elections.

If you’re OK with that, it may be because you’re just glad it’s over and because Trump won fair and square playing by the rules. Football games are won not by the team gaining the most yards but by the team scoring the most points. His victory is entirely legitimate.

But if you’re OK with it simply because your team has benefitted by those rules two out of the last five elections, remember this: What goes around can come around, and it easily could be the other team that benefits next time.

Defenders of the Electoral College say it protects small states, but in reality, it favors larger swing states where the most votes are. The Electoral College’s winner-take-all format in all states except Maine and Nebraska means many states are so safely red or blue that candidates ignore them. A candidate can win by one vote each in 11 big states and not even be on the ballot in the other 39 and still be elected. After the primaries, the two major party candidates never came to Arkansas because they knew Trump would win it. The outcome was a foregone conclusion. Moreover, the Electoral College herds voters into that binary red-blue mindset, marginalizing third party and independent candidates who might have something important to say.

Now there are calls to abolish it, mostly by Democrats, and replace it with a popular vote. If that were the case, in a very close election, the entire country would look like Florida in 2000. We’d all be picking through ballots one by one looking for hanging chads, or filing lawsuits saying electronic ballots were hacked.

Instead, let’s make the Electoral College better – to more accurately reflect the fact that the entire country is composed of different shades of purple instead of only red or blue. Instead of assigning electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, the number of votes should be increased in each state and then assigned proportionally.

Instead of Arkansas awarding six Electoral College votes, it could award 60 and divide them according to the results. Under that scenario, Trump would have won 37 votes, Clinton would have won 20, the Libertarian Gary Johnson would have won 2, and Evan McMullin would have won 1. Meanwhile, Trump would have won Electoral College votes in California and New York instead of those big states automatically going to Clinton. Maybe the two would have had to visit all of these places instead of camping out in the swing states.

I voted for McMullin, but give credit where credit’s due. Trump did what this column is all about: He saw purple where everyone else saw blue. Pennsylvania and Michigan had voted for the Democrat in six straight elections, while Wisconsin had voted Democrat seven elections in a row. Trump went up there and grabbed those votes – 107,000 more than Clinton between those three states, and that was enough to win him the presidency.

I just think the system would be better if it encouraged candidates to seek votes in reddish-purple Arkansas, too.

Related: A better Electoral College.

Arkansas Democrats get small win in tough week

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

Arkansas Democrats had a terrible week and then a good couple of hours.

The week was terrible for them for a lot of obvious reasons. On Tuesday, Republicans easily won all five of the contested congressional races, only two of which featured a Democratic challenger. At the State Capitol, Republicans increased their majorities by two in the Senate and seven in the House – then by another in the House on Wednesday when third term Rep. Jeff Wardlaw of Hermitage switched parties from Democrat to Republican.

The election’s one bright spot was supposed to be the presidential race. So much for that.

Republicans now occupy 100 of the Legislature’s 135 seats – 74 in the 100-member House and 26 in the 35-member Senate. In 2008, Democrats controlled 102 of the 135 seats.

At the state and national levels, Arkansas Democrats are fast becoming less a minority than a remnant. After a century and a half of one-party Democratic rule, Arkansas looks poised to be dominated by Republicans for decades, if not longer.

Then last Thursday, Democrats won a satisfying little victory when House members selected their committee assignments. There are 10 committees in the House – five more important “A” committees and five “B” committees – and Democrats thought they might could gain a majority on one of the A committees if they played their cards right. They did.

The way it works is that the members divide up by the four congressional districts and meet at the same time in different locations, Republicans and Democrats together, and choose their committees one at a time based on seniority. Early in the process, Democrats saw an opportunity to gain a majority on the Revenue and Taxation Committee. Texting each other across the different meeting rooms, they began selecting that committee. Before Republicans could organize to stop them, they had gained an 11-9 majority.

The move meant that Democrats are virtually nonexistent in the other committees, where the partisan breakdown is 17-3 in Education; 16-4 in Judiciary; 16-4 in Public Health; and 16-4 in Public Transportation. But they now have a majority in the committee through which tax cuts travel, or are supposed to travel.

And that might be kind of important, considering one of Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s stated goals is a $50 million tax cut. By controlling that committee, Democrats at least have a seat at the table in deciding who benefits most from that tax cut – lower-income working families, perhaps, instead of higher-income earners. Or perhaps they can use their majority as a bargaining chip for one of their other priorities, such as expanding access to pre-kindergarten classes.

Time will tell how much of an effect their gambit accomplishes. There’s only so much you can accomplish when you’re outnumbered 74-26. Speaker of the House Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, names committee chairs and can select a Republican to chair Revenue and Tax, just as he selected a Democrat, Rep. Joe Jett, D-Success, to chair it when Republicans had a majority. If Republicans want to play hardball, they can change the rules or just ram a tax cut through a different committee. Or they could just let the Democrats have this one. Some Republicans aren’t so sure the state needs much of a tax cut, anyway.

For the foreseeable future, this is the kind of thing Democrats will have to do if they want to remain relevant because it’s going to be tough for them to win at the state level outside of the Delta, Little Rock and Fayetteville. In many parts of the state, Democratic-leaning candidates will have to do what Republican-leaning candidates used to do, which is run for office as a member of the other party. Or they can run as Democrats and lose in hopes of building the party to fight another day – perhaps one a long way off.

Regardless, they’ll have to content themselves with the notion that there are more important things than numerical majorities. They’ll have to use their position to advance their favored legislation knowing many voters probably won’t give their party’s candidates a chance as long as they have a “D” by their names.

It’s not necessarily fair, but it’s how Republicans had to operate for 150 years, and it wasn’t fair then, either.

Too much politics

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

The Declaration of Independence specifies three inalienable rights it says are endowed by our Creator, one of them the right to pursue happiness, with government’s purpose being to secure those rights.

One way it can do that is to start the 2020 election season later.

This ugly election was a part of our lives for a year-and-a-half. Presidential campaigns have always been difficult and divisive, but this latest one uniquely tore a hole in the fabric of our society, and I’m not sure how it’s going to mend. Consider that President-elect Donald Trump announced he was running on June 15, 2015, while Hillary Clinton announced her campaign two months earlier, on April 12. The first of many Republican presidential debates – the one where Trump and Fox News’ Megyn Kelly first got into it – was August 6 of last year. The Iowa Caucuses were Feb. 1, more than nine months before the election, while Arkansans held their primary only a month later.

The idea of starting all of this again in only two-and-a-half years is unbearable at the moment, and truly not necessary. Americans are supposed to keep a watchful eye on their government, but too much politics isn’t good for anybody.

Most other democracies don’t do it this way. Elections occur when they are called, or when a party exits a governing coalition, or because of other such reasons. As a result, campaigns occur over a period of weeks, not years. Earlier this year in Great Britain, the prime minister voluntarily left office because he believed he had lost too much support after the Brexit vote. He was not disgraced, and there was no constitutional crisis; his party simply selected his successor. Within days, he was moving out of #10 Downing Street and she was moving in.

That kind of thing can’t happen in America. Our system was designed to have elections occur at regular intervals, and the writers of the Constitution didn’t take into account how powerful political parties would become or how much money would be involved. In 1787, the media was composed of printed newspapers, while discourse happened face to face, not on Facebook.

Constitutional change is needed, but that can take years. In the meantime, voluntary steps over the next four years can make the 2020 election cycle less divisive. Candidates can announce their intentions whenever they want, but let’s have no debates until 2020. The Iowa Caucuses should be moved to March 1 and the rest of the season compressed into a tighter period. Arkansas, which moved its own primaries from May to March 1, should permanently move the primaries back to May and never look back.

For this to happen, Americans will have to force the action. Politics is a free market economy, which means that if there’s a buyer, there will be a seller. This campaign season has been a boon for the news networks, which have seen higher ratings and therefore more advertising revenue. But what’s good for CNN and Fox News isn’t necessarily good for the rest of us, and so when the networks dangle the 2020 race in front of our faces in 2019, we should turn the channel or turn off politics completely.

This doesn’t mean Americans should stop caring about our democracy – it just means our attention should be focused more effectively. Instead of creating a market for another political circus in 2019, let’s pay more attention to the participatory processes of government, such as what laws and policies are enacted, and then save the campaigning and the debating until 2020.

A never-ending election cycle does not create a better democracy, and apparently a lot of Arkansans agree. On Tuesday, 70 percent of them voted for an amendment increasing county officials’ terms from two years to four, meaning county judges and sheriffs can actually spend time doing their jobs rather than putting up yard signs every two years.

So let’s appreciate the fact that we elect our leaders – but how about we give this a rest for a while, OK? The next presidential election is in 2020. Let’s keep it there, and use that extra time for more appropriate pursuits, including the one for happiness.

In praise of being naive

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

Somewhere there is a perfect spot on the spectrum between being naive and being cynical, and humans should try to find that perfect spot. But humans err, so err on the side of being naive.

I write that in the face of the most cynicism-inducing election of my lifetime. And I’m apparently not alone because a deep cynic would say that voting itself is an act of naivety, and yet Arkansans and people across the country are lining up at the polls to do it anyway.

Keep in mind that, regardless of what you think about this year’s choices, at least we had them: for the nation’s chief executive, for lawmakers and for local officials. For more than a year, two rich and powerful people who want to become even more powerful have been required to traverse the country as part of the world’s most challenging job interview. Arkansas voters this year also have a direct say in the governor’s powers; in how long county officials stay in office; in how much debt the state can incur for economic development; and whether marijuana should be used legally for medicinal purposes. True, my vote did not count for much. But it counted exactly the same as everyone else’s in Arkansas.

Giving an average citizen this kind of say is rare in world history but not so rare in today’s world, in large part because of the example set by the country where God let me be born. That’s pretty cool, which is why, even in the midst of all the cynicism of A.D. 2016, just about every polling machine was occupied at my early voting site in Benton, and why, afterwards, a family stood outside the polling place snapping a photo of their son who must have voted for the first time. They all looked pretty proud, but I guess they were just being naive.

Believing a New World would offer religious and economic freedom? You might call that naive. So was believing that freedom was worth fighting for. That self-government was possible. That former slaves and the children of slaves could participate in a society with former slaveowners and their children. That a railroad could be built across a country and a canal dug between the oceans. That wars could be won on foreign shores, and democracy was possible in far-off lands. That a man could land on the moon – in less than 10 years, no less.

It takes a certain naivety to do these things; it certainly doesn’t happen through cynicism. Cynicism is inherently an attitude of powerlessness and inaction, which is why cynics do not grow many successful businesses, plant churches, begin charities, or start movements that change things for the better. Cynicism is self-centered and fearful, and it assumes the worst of people to the point of gross inaccuracy. It’s incompatible with achievement and service because why try to achieve if seen and unseen forces doom you to failure? And why serve if you are only going to be taken advantage of? True, there are some very rich cynics today. But a lot of them only got that way by appealing to others’ cynicism.

Yes, naivety can lead to disaster, because it’s based on trust, and sometimes trust is misplaced. But better to trust too much than not enough. After disaster, a naive person can still “stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools,” as Rudyard Kipling wrote, because he trusts those tools.

I’ve heard it said and implied many times this year that, if either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins this election, then the country will not survive.

But such deep, pervasive cynicism is far more dangerous than the outcome of one campaign. It leads to the kind of “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” attitude of the old Soviet Union. In the United States, structures are still in place that will limit the damage either Clinton or Trump will cause. But a cynical people quits trying, which can’t be overcome.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure there’s going to be another election in four years, and we can all give it another shot. Call me naive.