Talk Elections

http://plsc.uark.edu/2014-Arkansas-Poll-summary-report-final.pdf

Clinton 47
Republican 38

Same sample that has Pryor losing by double digits.

Clinton won't carry Arkansas. She will come close though.

I think she'll win it vs. several potential GOP nominees.

Hilldawg is gonna whip out the paddle and administer a royal spanking to these GOP upstarts!

It is hard to imagine a state which Obama lost by 24 votes even being in play, even with a favorite daughter. But Bill did win it twice so maybe.

I still think Arkansas could be competitive in 2016 if Clinton is the nominee. She won't win it by nine points but she could easily do well against a weak Republican.

She's not really from Arkansas anymore, I'd argue.  She's basically a New Yorker.

I have a feeling that a lot of this is due to people projecting on Hillary an image that she almost certainly won't run on by the time the general rolls along.

The Arkansawyers see her as one of theirs. That matters.

What else explains her polling numbers.

That those particular Arkansans may be willing to approve a Democrat if he or she is white.

Junk poll! Hillary will easily lose Arkansas by double digits. She would be lucky to break 40%.

Calm down, Junkie. 

The Upper South didn't take to Obama for a couple of obvious reasons, one depressing (he's a black) and one reasonable (coal and new energy).  As of right now, many of them are cool with Hillary.  Usually, I feel like I can prognosticate these things, but I'm baffled as to how a Presidential campaign will hurt or help Hillary in states like AR, TN, MO, and WV.  Gonna have to really take a look at some of these 2014 exit polls... and even then I have to extrapolate for increased turnout.   

If the Republicans go full throttle on a Corporatist agenda, then democrats can hit them with a populist agenda. Southern whites have readily accepted Southern agrarian whites as their sorts of conservatives... but they are not going to be so supportive of d@mnyankee right-wingers who have nothing to offer but peonage on behalf of Northern financiers and industrialists.  

It would be a feat if any Democrat reached Kerry's % in 2016. I wouldn't be shocked at this point if Hillary didn't break 40%.

In the case of West Virginia I almost wonder if Tennant was just an unusually bad candidate combined with 2014 being an unusually bad year for Democrats nationally because even in 2012 Manchin won his senate race by almost as large a margin as Romney at the presidential level.

Arkansas is not a coal state. Kentucky and West Virginia are.


The top 16 states in coal production:


    Wyoming (338,900).
    West Virginia (158,257)
    Kentucky (130,688)
    Pennsylvania (74,619)
    Texas (49,498)
    Montana (38,352)
    Illinois (33,444)
    Virginia (32,834)
    North Dakota (31,270)
    Colorado (29,137)
    Indiana (27,965)
    New Mexico (27,323)
    Utah (26,656)
    Ohio (22,269)
    Alabama (19,324)
    Arizona (13,111)

()

VA & NC are solid R but AR is competitive?

I completely disagree. If Blanche and Pryor can't pull 40% in their respective races, no way is Hillary making it close. I'd say even in the event of a disastrous GOP candidate and a poor campaign, her ceiling would be around 46%.

Blanche and Pryor were both running in toxic Democratic environments. Hillary will be running in a presidential year with higher turnout in [probably] a more neutral political atmosphere. While one cannot deny that Arkansas has swung incredibly rightward, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that she will certainly try to make Arkansas competitive; if nothing else, shave off some of the McCain/Romney margin and keep the Republican in single digits; however, if it's a Cruz/Carson/Paul type, she could very well win the state.

Nonsense. All of those candidates are well suited for AR.

Yes, Christie is the candidate that could blow Arkansas for the Republicans.

In Presidential years in the past, and probably not anymore. The Republicans have played up the plantation heritage of most of the South, and it well fits an old ideal of extreme inequality and exploitation  that fits the GOP elsewhere.

The "New South" of the 1970s through the 1990s of Al Gore and Bill Clinton is dead. The GOP in most of the South might as well revive the old White Citizens Councils and Sovereignty Committees as tools of political control and repression.  The Democrats are going to win a statewide election Texas before they win any in the Mid-South (Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. 2026, maybe, in Texas, which has a very different ethnic mix and political heritage.

All that stops the full return of White Power in the Mid-South are the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 24th Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Lol no. I appeal to my fellow forumites - how many of you believe that slavery would be instituted in the South today without the 13th amendment?

I doubt Hillary can carry AR. They even despise their own homegrown conservadems like Pryor now, so I doubt they'll take too kindly to Hillary as a national figure. That said, it will be interesting to see how much she improves from Obama's numbers.

Hillary might be ahead in Arkansas right now, but after a campaign in which she probably embraces some  typical Democratic positions, I can't see her winning Arkansas, or even coming close. I think the best she could do would be to lose Arkansas by about 10 points.

I said "White Power" and not overt slavery. Maybe a restoration of Jim Crow practice as a sop to poor white people deluded into believing that blacks are the Enemy and that their exploiters are benefactors. Jim Crow also implied severe inequality among white people, crony capitalism, economic backwardness, and substandard public services. 

   

No there isnt. Pryor losing by nearly 20 points after Clinton came out big for him, shows AR has gotten over the Clintons.

She'll lose, but she'll most likely keep it to single digits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_Lincoln
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pryor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Ross_%28politician%29

Exactly. Polling so far indicates Christie is perceived poorly in the South. If Hillary really drives home a populist message, she can snatch a narrow win in the state.

Nonsense. Her ceiling is 43-46% against anyone.

Arkansas voters have clearly shown that the Clinton era is over. Arkansas' white voters (black voters are now irrelevant) fully believe in absolute plutocracy. 2014 may be the peak for the trend, but that trend will not abate quickly. So it is in Louisiana and Tennessee. The New South, in which poor whits and poor blacks believed that they had something in common due to their shared poverty and allowed a Carter victory in 1976 and Clinton victories in 1992 and 1996 is over. This is not to say that Jim Crow will be back in full force and that the White Citizens Councils are running the political show, but in essence the political realities of Arkansas circa 2016 will be  much like those of Arkansas in 1960 except that overt segregation is no more and that the reactionary interests are fully in command through the Republican party instead of the Democratic Party. 

Evertime liberals lose it is becasue of racism

No -- it is more likely that racism will result from the right-wing shift in Southern politics.

Southern politics have typically been all about patronage, with winners dealing out goodies to electoral supporters and high taxes to everyone else.  That is the Jacksonian tradition at its harshest. Such abated during the New South era, but that era is gone. What follows?

There won't be a return to Jim Crow. TV cameras exposed how nasty the South was during the early 1960s with network news typically showing some reactionary pol proclaiming "We treat our Nigras well, and we have trouble only because of outside agitators" followed to a cut to an image of squalor complete with poorly-clothed black children with distended bellies. 

So it won't be that bad. It will be bad schools, low pay, poor public service, ineffective -but-brutal law enforcement, horrible prisons, and laws that give exploiters all the advantages.  It will be a place for people with a work ethic but no other assets to leave.