Posted on 11/05/2014 8:56:18 AM PST by right-wing agnostic
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — While a student at the University of Arkansas in 1985, Sen. Mark Pryor (D) wrote his college thesis on the state of Arkansas’ two-party system.
“The state’s Republicans have traditionally failed to produce politicians that Arkansas would elect,” he wrote. “The Democratic party, as a result, has thrived on a sort of perpetual motion.”
That perpetual motion came to an end Tuesday night. Voters chose Republican Tom Cotton over Pryor, and for the first time in 141 years, there will be no Democrats in Arkansas’ congressional delegation. Republicans also won the gubernatorial race and every other statewide race.
“Twelve years ago, the people of Arkansas gave me the greatest privilege of my life,” Pryor said Tuesday at his campaign’s election night party at the DoubleTree Hotel in Little Rock. He said he had called Cotton to “wish him the very best.” “I want you to know he will be in my prayers,” Pryor said.
Cotton, a 37-year-old Harvard and Harvard law grad and Army veteran who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, tied Pryor to President Obama throughout the campaign, saying Pryor voted with Obama 93 percent of the time. He was disciplined about his message too, using everything from Ebola to President Bill Clinton’s visits to stump for Pryor to remind voters about Obama (“I’m not so worried about Bill Clinton’s support for Mark Pryor. I’m more worried for Mark Pryor’s support about Barack Obama,” he and his spokesman would say when asked whether they were concerned about the still-popular Clinton’s numerous campaign stops for Pryor in the campaign’s final weeks).
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Penance for the Clintons?
And nothing will change.
The Clintons did well by moving to New York.
Ditto Utah with Mia Love winning District 4!
The Great State of Arkansas
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"Arkansas is a state located in the Southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. The state's diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozarks and the Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta. Arkansas is the 29th most extensive and the 32nd most populous of the 50 United States. The capital and most populous city is Little Rock, located in the central portion of the state. The Territory of Arkansas was admitted to the union as the 25th state on June 15, 1836.
The name “Arkansas” derives from the same root as the name for the state of Kansas. The Kansa tribe of Native Americans are closely associated with the Sioux tribes of the Great Plains. The word “Arkansas” itself is a French pronunciation (“Arcansas”) of a Quapaw (a related “Kaw” tribe) word, akakaze, meaning “land of downriver people” or the Sioux word akakaze meaning “people of the south wind”. "source: Wikipedia
Thank you, Arkansas FReepers!
I'm still surprised that he ran again..I was convinced last year that he'd retire..go out gracefully..you think he'd have learned after what happened to Blanche Lincoln..
Democratic dominance was the result of the Civil War. Arkansas was one of the old states of the Deep South that seceded from the Union as a slave state and fought to protect the peculiar institution.
It was occupied by Union forces during the Civil War and was readmitted to the Union around 1870. Republican rule was associated with the Southern defeat and every one who knew every one was a Democrat for generations.
There were very few Republicans in Arkansas until recently and no GOP party organization existed except in the northwest corner of the state and any one who wanted to get into politics had to become a Democrat.
That makes Tuesday’s transformation in Arkansas all the more stunning.
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