Arkansas’ Senate Race Is A Marquee Match-up

Editor’s note: This article is the cover story of our latest Talk Business & Politics magazine. At the bottom of this post, you can find the extended video of Sunday’s political roundtable between Cotton spokesman David Ray and Pryor deputy campaign manager Erik Dorey.

Few heavyweight fights live up to the hype, but political observers across the country are eyeing the U.S. Senate contest in Arkansas between Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor and Republican challenger Cong. Tom Cotton in hopes that it will live up to its epic billing.

Control of the U.S. Senate – and perhaps the nation’s political agenda – are at stake.

The Senate race between Blanche Lincoln and John Boozman was well-determined by this point in the summer of 2010. Lincoln was TKO’d after her 2009 vote on the federal health care overhaul, Obamacare. Boozman merely showed up and put his name on the card and coasted to a 23-point victory in November.

This cycle’s Senate race started last August and eleven months into it, there is still not a clear favorite. With five months to go, it appears we’re headed for a late-round decision.

“I think the fact that it’s still competitive in June — unlike, for example, the race four years ago between Blanche Lincoln and John Boozman — at least in the short term is good news for Democrats,” said Jonathan Martin, national political correspondent for the New York Times.

A Talk Business-Hendrix College Poll in April showed Pryor with a three-point lead, 45.5% to 42.5%. Since then nearly a dozen polls have been released – some independent, some partisan. Pryor and Cotton have evenly split a half-dozen of them tracked by RealClearPolitics.com with each candidate leading in three of the six polls. According to RealClearPolitics.com, which aggregates and averages the polls in the race, Cotton has a slight +2.8 percent lead – certainly within anyone’s margin for error.

For Arkansas Democrats, Pryor is bucking a two-cycle trend by remaining competitive. The Republican tsunami that swept Lincoln out of office in 2010 carried through to Congressional races, state constitutional offices, the Arkansas General Assembly, and a number of county-level positions. It was a historic year.

Republicans made further gains – though not as large as expected – in 2012 and the conventional wisdom has been that 2014 would continue the red state trend. After all, Barack Obama is still President and his 35% popularity in Arkansas has haunted nearly every Democratic contender.

“Democrats are feeling good as of right now that Pryor is still very much in this thing,” Martin said. “But Democrats, privately, concede that it’s going to be awfully tough for Pryor to get the number of Romney voters that he needs in 2014. It’s tough for a Democrat to win statewide in a federal race in Arkansas because you have to get so many folks that vote nationally for Republicans for the White House. So I think Democrats are aware of that challenge.”

Cotton is working hard to tie Pryor to the President. In a late June ad titled “Toe the Line,” Cotton asserts that Pryor “votes with Obama” 90% of the time.

That charge is based on a Congressional Quarterly (CQ) rating system, which tracks party line voting and voting with the President when he has taken a clear position on an issue. They are two different statistics.

The Pryor team says Cotton is ignoring the fact that in 2013 Pryor broke with the President “more than any other Senate Democrat.” Pryor has an even lower percentage of voting with the Democratic Party — only 80% of the time. Both are still a high percentage to the average voter.

But Cotton has “loyalty” problems of his own. Those same CQ ratings note that Cotton votes with Republican House leadership 97% of the time. Congress is not exactly known for its popularity, but the Pryor campaign has not made as large a referendum on this Cotton allegiance as Cotton is making of Pryor.

Cotton doesn’t have a perfect attendance record avoiding Obama either. The CQ numbers show Cotton siding with Obama 12% of the time.

Other scoring systems are often touted including The National Journal, which doesn’t rank Pryor in its Top 15 most liberal or conservative senators. Cotton also doesn’t make The National Journal’s list on either side.

And GovTrack.US, a non-partisan government transparency web site, gives Pryor conservative scores among Senate Democrats and his bill co-sponsorships. He’s ranked by that group at the most conservative Senate Democrat and 44th most conservative among all Senators.

GovTrack ranks Cotton pretty low on the bipartisanship scale, noting that he’s 5th lowest out of 74 House freshman, 30th lowest out of 229 House Republicans, and 30th lowest out of all 435 members of Congress.

The Pryor camp hasn’t used these statistics, but they do underscore their narrative that Cotton is not willing to work across party lines.

TIME TO DEFINE
So what will define this race for the fall?

Some say it already has been defined.

Dr. Jay Barth, professor of political science at Hendrix College, contends Cotton missed an early opportunity to define himself when he entered the race last fall. By attacking Pryor on his Obama connections on Day One and not establishing to voters that he was a “principled” candidate who may make seemingly rigid decisions, Barth says Pryor was able to hang the “reckless” label on Cotton effectively.

“I think the dynamics were such that Cotton had a chance to put it away early,” said Barth, who ran for Democratic office in 2010 and has contributed to Pryor’s campaign.

“He didn’t fully introduce himself to Arkansas voters when he announced last year. He and outside groups went straight to the attack,” Barth said. “Because they failed to introduce Cotton to voters, the attacks were less believable, but it also kept Cotton’s flank open to be hit pretty hard on his voting record.”

Based on conversations with political sources, The New York Times’ Martin agrees.

“Among Republicans privately, there is concern about Cotton’s campaign and Cotton as a candidate,” Martin said. “If you look at his ads — and he’s tried a few different times now to personalize himself, to humanize himself with various family members — I think it sort of speaks to the challenge he has in trying to relate to Arkansans. So you do hear Republicans talk privately about that.”

But Republicans argue that Cotton’s latest string of ads that include his mother, father and new wife, Anna, have been effective in reversing the “impersonal” label that Democrats claim they’ve hung on Cotton.

The candidate was self-deprecating about his reputation in a recent Politico news article. “I’m warm, dammit,” Cotton joked during an interview over breakfast with the reporter.

Republicans also suggest that the more personal ads have been effective moving Cotton’s likability numbers, especially among voters in areas of the state who don’t know Tom Cotton and are just now starting to engage in the race.

“The bio ads utilizing his mother, his father, his wife are all designed to say he’s your next door neighbor,” says GOP strategist and radio commentator Bill Vickery.

“Obviously, Tom Cotton is defining Mark Pryor as a supporter of the president,” Vickery said. “I think the Pryor people are creating this ‘unknown’ about Tom Cotton. It becomes more of a question of the devil that you know versus the devil you don’t know.”

The Cotton camp is pinning its campaign message on the continued unpopularity of Obama and Pryor’s relationship to the national Democratic Party and its titular leader. It worked in 2010. It worked in 2012. And Vickery says it will work again in 2014.

“Most definitely, 100%, it will work in 2014. There are only three things for certain in life: death, taxes and the unpopularity of Obamacare in the South,” Vickery said. “That message may still be working 15 years from now. Obamacare is the symbol of a lack of credibility of leadership.”

Barth said he views Pryor’s Obama and Obamacare ties as a hurdle, but not impossible for the incumbent to overcome. For starters, the Pryor name is political platinum in Arkansas owing to the endearment of Mark’s father, former Sen. David Pryor. Mark Pryor is also an approachable politician. He’s come home regularly and tended to constituents credibly.

Barth also contends that cooling hostility toward the federal health care law and its Arkansas interpretation, the Private Option, has deflated the issue among some voters, especially independents.

“I think the early Obamacare attacks were quite good at coalescing the base of support for Cotton, but it didn’t churn any new ground in terms of reaching independent voters,” said Barth. And Barth thinks the Pryor political brand is distinctive from the national Democratic brand.

“In particular, the Pryor brand works well with older voters, who have skewed very Republican in the last few cycles here. I think they have and will stay largely at home with Pryor,” he said.

If Cotton wants the race to be about Obama, Pryor wants the race to be about Cotton.

The first-term freshman has cast a number of controversial votes that the Pryor camp and its allies have used repeatedly to paint Cotton as “too reckless” for Arkansas. They point to his vote against the Farm Bill, his opposition to expanding disaster aid, and budget bill votes that called for raising the age thresholds for Medicare and Social Security to age 70.

Cotton willingly defends the votes, but they often require more than 30 second sound bites. They also don’t necessarily mollify critics.

At a recent Delta Grassroots Caucus meeting in Little Rock, Cotton described the Farm Bill as the “Food Stamp Bill” because of its heavy fiscal influence on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Pryor told the group the Farm Bill should be labeled the “Rural America Bill” for the many policy and financial aspects the bill covers.

There’s your stark contrast in political worldviews.

WOMEN & INDEPENDENTS
So the day after the 2014 U.S. Senate race – November 5, 2014 – political pundits, partisan strategists, and a voting public that has been inundated with a 16-month campaign will ask a very simple question that will beg analysis: How did he win?

The key may lie in two vast, but important, voter demographics with which each campaign contends they must “run up the score.”

For Pryor, he must do well with women. Females account for nearly 53% of voter turnout in Arkansas and Pryor needs to not just win this demo, he needs to clean Cotton’s clock with them.

Pryor has touted his positions with Paycheck Fairness for women, his support to curb domestic violence against women, his support for raising the state minimum wage, the Arkansas Private Option, and his stances on Social Security and Medicare as evidence of his alignment with women. During Christmas, Pryor’s “Compass” ad featured him describing his Biblical faith in another effort to connect with women voters.

What Pryor needs with female turnout, Cotton needs from Independent voters.

In the last two election cycles, Republicans have run up totals with indie voters by two-to-one, three-to-one, even four-to-one margins. In previous polling, Cotton bests Pryor among independents, but he hasn’t started lapping the Senator yet.

His campaign said those indie numbers are moving in the right direction and they credit the introductory ads that Cotton has unveiled with his family as well as a popular ad he recorded with his former Army drill sergeant.

Independent voters in Arkansas cut across a wide swath of age, income and party lines. They can be young, middle-aged or old. They may be upwardly mobile in income or on fixed incomes, and the question of party loyalty has skewed towards Democrats in the past.

These Democratic indies despise Pres. Obama, but they’ve been voting Republican for President for many cycles. The intensity of their dislike for Obama and the direction they feel he has led the country have pushed them to pull the lever for down-ballot Republican candidates that they hope can put the brakes on an unpopular President’s agenda.

Cotton understands that anger and angst. His ads, and the ads of many outside spending groups, simply state that Pryor and Obama are aligned politically and philosophically. Pryor’s saving grace is his longevity in Arkansas politics and the familiarity many voters have with his father and him.

Is the strength of the Pryor brand capable of overcoming the Obama albatross? Can Cotton convince enough voters that he’s not the callous robot he’s been portrayed to be? Could a debate moment or an experience on the campaign trail somehow define the Senate race in a yet-to-be-determined manner?

On November 5th, we’ll have the answers to these questions. Between now and then:

It. Should. Be. Epic.