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Campaign Desk noted yesterday how the actual results in Arkansasâs Senate primary complicate the national narratives about an anti-incumbent wave and the rise of political activists. So itâs only fair to note that some national outlets are offering a fuller picture of the outcome there.
For example, the initial story from the Associated Press declared in its lead that Arkansas voters had delivered âa muddled verdict on establishment politicians.â Itâs a fair point: after all, Bill Halter, the Democratic challenger who pushed incumbent Blanche Lincoln into a run-off, was an aide in the Clinton administration. Halter may have claimed the âoutsiderâ mantle, but heâs no neophyte. Meanwhile, in the GOP Senate primaryâwhich has been almost entirely neglected by the national mediaâvoters went resoundingly for Rep. John Boozman, a five-term congressman whoâs as plain-vanilla D.C. establishment as you can get. No Tea Party insurgency here.
Then, a good, short dispatch by Shaila Dewan in todayâs New York Times took note of the key fact about the Democratic contest: at least some of Halterâs supporters turned out to be not who we thought they were:
When word circulated early Tuesday evening that Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas had won the early and absentee vote in Pulaski County, the county that includes Little Rock, her supporters took it as a sign that she would pull off a decisive win in the Democratic primary.
Little Rock and other urban areas were supposed to belong to her rival, Lt. Gov Bill Halter, who was enthusiastically supported by labor unions and national liberal groups. Rural counties, with more conservative voters, were supposed to go to Mrs. Lincoln, a moderate who is the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. If Mrs. Lincoln had prevailed in her adversaryâs territory, the thinking went, she must have prevailed everywhere.
But the final vote count upended all that careful reasoningâŚ
Mrs. Lincoln won in urban areas like Little Rock and Fayetteville. While some analysts predicted that she was in trouble with black voters, she won in seven of nine Arkansas counties that are more than 40 percent black, perhaps aided by radio advertisements by Mr. Obama that were in heavy rotation on black-oriented stations.
But she lost 20 of 26 largely white, rural counties that stretch diagonally across the state. Those counties, which went strongly for John McCain in 2008, are considered decisive swing counties, Ms. Parry said.
(Ms. Parry would be Janine Parry, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas, who tells the Times that she is âstill trying to figure out what happened.â)
While the unexpected vote breakdown didnât make it into some of the initial national accounts, several Arkansas journalists picked up on it immediately. One of them, John Brummett of the Arkansas News Bureau, has a column today outlining his take: Halter assembled an unlikely coalition of âliberal money and conservative votes.â Some Halter voters, Brummett writes, were anti-Lincoln, but not for the same reasons MoveOn.org and the SEIU are anti-Lincoln:
The e-mail reported that two old boys dressed in hunting attire were on the steps of the Grant County Courthouse boasting about how theyâd never voted before in a Democratic primary, but had gone that way this time, by George, and for Bill Halter, to get rid of that blankety-blank Blanche Lincoln.
Hours later, we had empirical confirmation that Halter, with the money and passion of MoveOn.org and unions and bicoastal liberal groups, had won this Grant County, just as he had won Garland County, Columbia County, Miller County, Little River County and other good olâ boy nests across what we like to lovingly call LA, for Lower ArkansasâŚ
White rural conservatives and good olâ boys arenât much enamored of Halter now and certainly wonât be enamored of him by November after the Republicans pour several millions into the state to explain who and what he is â meaning a labor guy a tad left of this very Blanche Lincoln whom the good olâ boys targeted Tuesday.
But Halter, and the dude D.C. Morrison [ed.âwho, the Times notes, described President Obama as a âsocialistâ and pulled in 13 percent of the primary vote on a $40,000 campaign budget] were mere agents to be used to express a mildly irrational anger at Lincoln.
So does all this mean that the ârise of the activistsâ narrative is off-base in Arkansas but the âanti-incumbent fervorâ narrative applies? Well, maybe; for some voters, Lincoln does seem to have worn out her welcome. But it would be just as plausible to argue that a GOP-friendly environment in Arkansasâunsurprising, given long-run trends in the South and the historical record of the presidentâs party losing ground in the midtermsâis at least as big a part of whatâs going on here. Whoever wins the Democratic run-off, after all, will be a heavy underdog to the very establishment Republican in the general election. (As for the limits of the âanti-incumbentâ storyline more generally, consider this point from James Joyner: âmost incumbents who run this year will get re-elected. The difference between an âanti-incumbent waveâ and a normal cycle is a re-election rate of 85% rather than 95%.â)
More broadly, though, the point is not so much that the press should be slotting this weekâs elections into the ârightâ narrative as that we should be very wary of slotting them into any national narrative. The increasing influence of activists and the current anger at Washington are real, but they interact with other factorsâtrends in partisanship, the constellation of candidates in a given race, the arbitrary rules governing local primaries, etc., etc.âin ways that are variable and unpredictable, and that may not add up to anything like a coherent message, especially in the handful of races that happen to be held on one given day of the year.
Figuring out what it all âmeansâ takes time, hard work, and knowledge of different contexts, and sometimes is simply beyond our capacity. Good reporting about the votes is reporting that attempts to tell readers, in as much detail as possible, what happened and why itâs interestingâand is honest about the limits of our ability, at the moment, to do much more than that.
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