Hillary, Huckabee face an uncertain Arkansas electorate in 2016

Arkansas, ever a peculiar place, either has two presidential candidates or none, unless you could say, as you probably can, that it has one more than it has the other.

Hillary Clinton, a native Chicagoan, left Arkansas in January 1993 to join her husband in residence in the White House. She, and he, now live in Chappaqua, N.Y., but are residents of the world, really.

Mike Huckabee, from Hope, left Arkansas not long after losing his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and landing a nice-paying gig as host of a Saturday night talk and entertainment show on Fox News. By 2011 he had built for himself and his wife Janet a big Ramada Inn-looking mansion within yards of the gulf waters on the Redneck Riviera in Florida, where, by the way, the state charges no income tax.

So the question for these purposes is whether there is a true Arkansas candidate in the presidential field. Is there a significant continued relationship with Arkansas for either of these candidates? Is there significant residual favorite-son or favorite-daughter identification and support in either case?

The best and fairest answer seems to be that Huckabee has a stronger continuing personal presence. And it is that he also enjoys the advantage of the state’s having gone wholesale Republican since he left, and in a way he could not influence himself in nearly a dozen years as a minority governor.

And there is new polling to confirm that.

MAKING A CASE FOR DAD
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mike and Janet’s daughter and campaign manager for her dad, makes a case, and not a bad one, that her dad is still at least partly Arkansan. For one thing, Sarah herself lives in Little Rock and has bestowed grandchildren, including one born this spring, on the proud Huckabees, who continue to maintain a residence in North Little Rock and spend occasional evenings there.

Hillary, on the other hand, has a granddaughter who lives in Manhattan in a $10 million block-long apartment – the longest apartment in the city, it is said. Hillary has no residence in Arkansas, and, in fact, lived only briefly in the state in anything other than public housing.

Huckabee has placed his presidential campaign headquarters in Little Rock. Hillary’s campaign headquarters is in Brooklyn. Huckabee announced his candidacy in Hope, perhaps to advance his theme as a veteran Clinton rival. Hillary announced her candidacy on Roosevelt Island on the East River in New York City.

Huckabee was governor of the state recently enough – for nearly a dozen years until January 2007 – that he still has a sufficient number of appreciative associates and patronage recipients in Arkansas to have put together in early June a series of well-attended fundraisers in the state.

Official hosts of those events included every current statewide constitutional office-holder and congressional delegate except U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, an always-special case. Cotton is financially and philosophically tied to the economically conservative Club for Growth, which sees Huckabee as a big-spending populist. And Cotton is rather clearly ambitious for himself, though apparently not in the presidential context for 2016. The vice presidential context might be another matter.

Even Gov. Asa Hutchinson, once considered a rival of Huckabee for state Republican preeminence, has signed on as an endorser of Huckabee, though it’s probably for convenience. Formally aligning with a home-state associate who may not last long in the presidential race gives Hutchinson an excuse not to choose now among fellow Republican governors running or perhaps to run – Chris Christie of New Jersey, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio, Bobby Jindall of Louisiana and Rick Perry of Texas.

Two current constitutional officers – Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and Treasurer Dennis Milligan – are close former associates of Huckabee. Rutledge worked for Huckabee’s governor’s office and Milligan’s chief of staff is Huckabee’s brother-in-law. Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin works now for Huckabee’s campaign as a consultant, though, as Griffin publicly insists, he is unpaid.

LONGTIME SUPPORTERS
The Huckabee fundraisers were hosted otherwise mostly by usual suspects, such longtime Huckabee-ites as Lisenne Rockefeller, Johnny Allison, Steve Landers, Ed Bethune and Rick Caldwell.

Perhaps the most notable host was the multi-millionaire class action lawyer from Texarkana, Johnny Goodson. He has become perhaps the state’s most active political money man and power broker. That’s up to and including being married to Courtney Goodson, the justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court likely to run next year for chief justice.

“He’s a personal friend. He’s been very kind to me,” Goodson says of Huckabee.

He explains that their relationship is a Texarkana thing, based largely on mutual friends and going back to Huckabee’s early-1990s stint as pastor of the Beech Street Baptist Church there.

It also is possible that Goodson, once identified as a Democrat, is performing the perfunctory motions of supporting Huckabee because of the coalescence around the former governor of the state Republican establishment, which his wife will need in her supposed nonpartisan race for chief justice in a newly Republicanized state.

It probably should be noted that daughter Sarah helps Huckabee with his continued Arkansas ties. While he’s been entertaining in New York and living on the beach and traveling to give speeches, she has run a Republican consulting business in Arkansas and worked for John Boozman, French Hill and others.

By Sarah’s planning, Huckabee spoke at a series of rallies last fall for the overwhelmingly victorious Republican ticket. His help might not have been needed or even of much consequence. But it was appreciated.

Hillary, on the other hand, has only remnants of remaining personal relationships in Arkansas, where the politics has roamed far from the domination, or even the influence, of her husband. Her closest and dearest Arkansas associates – her parents, Diane Blair, Vince Foster – are deceased. She is said to stay somewhat in touch with Ann Henry of Fayetteville and Patty Howe Criner of Little Rock.

Otherwise, her chief political friends operating in her behalf in Arkansas seem to be Bob Nash, who worked for Bill as governor and president, and Sheila Bronfman, a long-time Clinton associate and political consultant in Little Rock who, among other things, coordinates the “Arkansas Travelers,” who famously ventured to New Hampshire for Bill in the troubled winter of the “Comeback Kid” in 1992.

“Political camp for adults” is how Bronfman says the Traveler experience has been described.

ORGANIZATIONAL MEETINGS
Bronfman says she and Nash and others have helped put together small grassroots organizational gatherings for Hillary supporters in Little Rock, Fayetteville, Texarkana, Russellville, Hot Springs, Helena and Conway. Actually, the Hillary campaign – adopting the Barack Obama ground-game model – has been holding such gatherings across the country.

Bronfman says about half the people attending have been unknown to her, a confirmed Clintonite since 1978. House parties around the state on the occasion of Hillary’s formal announcement were hosted mostly by people she didn’t know, Bronfman says.

That’s a good thing, and by design. The New York Times has explained that Hillary is basing her campaign more on Obama’s experience in 2008 and 2012 than her husband’s in 1992 and 1996. She is running to appeal to a narrower leftish base and devoting efforts early to organizing from the grassroots with new and younger blood. (Those gatherings are to be distinguished from a briefing conducted for about 70 or 80 confirmed and veteran Clinton insiders, aides and donors at a private residence in Little Rock in early May by John Podesta, former chief of staff to Bill and now Hillary’s campaign chairman. He reportedly laid out national strategy and stressed the need for early donations and ground-level organizing, but didn’t commit any particular effort in Arkansas.)

Hillary likely won’t be competitive in Arkansas if she gets to the general election, as expected, regardless of the Republican nominee, who, most people predict, won’t be Huckabee. But Arkansas Democrats say she can raise money here, line up workers here for deployment elsewhere and generally buoy the beleaguered state party by energizing the base.

In fact, Hillary will speak July 18 at the state party’s Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner at Verizon Arena. She will generate dollars for the party. She will create buzz. She will bring energy. She will fire up old friends and true believers. Beyond that, though, there seems to be a schism of sorts among Arkansas Democrats – one that’s a little generational, actually – about the lingering umbilical cord linking the gloried Clinton heritage in Arkansas and the contemporary focus of a generally devastated state Democratic Party.

THE POST-CLINTON ERA
It is about whether and how to negotiate what seems to be the post-Clinton era. Dale Bumpers is within days of his 90th birthday. David Pryor is 80. Bill Clinton and Mike Beebe push hard against 70.

There are exasperated younger Democrats – not to be identified for obvious reasons in the seeming heresy they express – who complain about the party’s self-destructive unweaning from past glories, even a continuing obsession with them, while the party has collapsed and the Arkansas Republicans have advanced and elected a new generation – Cotton, Griffin, Rutledge.

The Republicans are electing 30-somethings and the Democrats are having appreciation dinners for yesteryear’s superstars. At least that’s how some see it. Some Democratic activists – younger, mostly – say the party needs to set about rebuilding from the county level up, and by promoting rural Democratic officials in addition to higher-profile younger ones in Little Rock such as state Reps. Clarke Tucker and Warwick Sabin. They say that any surviving notion that Hillary's presence on the ballot in 2016 will revive happy days is sadly misguided.

She'll do better than Obama, but probably no better that Al Gore, who lost the state and thus the presidency, most trained Arkansas political observers agree. Indeed, even Bronfman, chief among the unreconstructed Clintonites, agrees that the last election cycle proved that there is no applicable Clinton magic anymore in the state.

“Bill did everything he could,” she says.

He came to the state time and again to speak at rallies, to keep his word to Democrats who’d waged their campaigns with his promise of timely help, and Democrats got utterly creamed.

That’s why, Bronfman says, it’s wise that Hillary is running a different kind of campaign and organizing from the bottom up to attract new people.

Even so, Bronfman says she has a list of about 600 persons signed up to be “Arkansas Travelers” and go to New Hampshire or Iowa or elsewhere for Hillary. She says she never had more than 550 or so signed up at any one time for Bill.

There are some mostly younger Arkansas Democrats who think a continued reliance on the Clintons as a source of hope and optimism is at risk of destructive perpetuation through Hillary’s presence on the ballot in 2016. Bronfman says she accepts the political reality and is inclined to believe Hillary can’t win Arkansas ... except, she stresses, for that ever-present factor she calls “you never know.”

She recalls that she and everyone else assumed throughout 1991 that George H.W. Bush, fresh from the war victory liberating Kuwait, could not possibly be denied a second term. In a few months, she was celebrating that her friend Bill Clinton had beaten him.

For the time being, though, the latest polling shows with great clarity that everything points to a better climate in Arkansas for Huckabee – and not so much for him personally as for any Republican – than for Hillary, or for anyone associated with Obama or running by his model.

THE SURVEY SAYS
In a survey of 1,183 voters conducted June 8-11 by Talk Business & Politics along with Impact Management Group and Hendrix College, respondents – 80% robo-called and 20% participating online – provided this snapshot of the Arkansas electorate:
43% said they’d vote in the Republican primary March 1 and 30% said they’d vote Democratic that day.

Obama’s approval-disapproval rating in Arkansas remains in previously unencountered territory in terms of unfavorability, with 33% of respondents approving and 63% disapproving.

Hillary Clinton’s approval rating is 38% and her negative 53%.

Huckabee’s approval rating is 47% and his negative 35%.

In head-to-head competition, Huckabee defeats Hillary by 51-37%.

But a generic Republican candidate actually beats Hillary by a wider margin, 50-33%, than the 14-point one that the semi-home state GOP candidate Huckabee can fashion.

Clinton picks up four percentage points herself, and peels one point from the opposition, when paired against Huckabee specifically rather than any old Republican candidate. The empirical data thus confirms the anecdotal. Arkansas is a Republican state now, first and foremost because of the uncommon popularity of Obama, to whom Clinton is tied.

"I still see one more anti-Obama election in Arkansas," says Richard Bearden, head of Little Rock-based Impact Management.

Obama won't be on the ballot in November 2016, but he'll still be in office and the news, still irking for whatever reason nearly 70% of Arkansas voters.

The Floridian Huckabee is not overwhelmingly popular in Arkansas in a personal sense. He is less popular than a generic Republican, in fact. But that association alone – Republican, that is, not native Arkansan – gives him powerful advantages in the state of his grandchildren.

That’s especially so when he is paired against a New York woman who was Obama’s secretary of state and is running a campaign like Obama’s.