When did we win the AR legislature, 2012? It was still Dem when they redrew the districts for the 2012 elections.
Yup, won both chambers just in November. Gerrymandering couldn’t help them maintain a narrow control. In the State Senate, the GOP won 6 seats, going from 20D-15R to 21R-14D (when Huckster left office with the ‘06 elections, the Dems had a commanding 27 to 8 majority, and had those same numbers until 2011). In the State House, they won 5 (but a crucial 5), going from 54D-46R to 51R-48D-1 Green (and contrast that in ‘06, they were outnumbered 3-to-1, 75D-25R, gaining 3 seats in ‘08 and a whopping 18 seats in ‘10).
I observed back in the mid 2000s that the key problem the AR GOP had was that they had only two areas in the state where they won legislative seats, and those were up in the heavily GOP NW corner (from Ft. Smith north to the MO border) and in suburban Little Rock. They smashed through the rural Democrat dominance outside those areas in 2010, although they’ve got many more seats to win (indeed, the Dems having 48 seats in the House is very tenuous — 13 of those seats were won by at or below 10%, and several more incumbents drew no challengers, but will be open seats before long because of term limits).
I expect AR will end up like it has or is trending in the other Southern states, with at or above 70% GOP strength, with all the Dem legislative members hailing from the urban areas (trendy/upscale liberal White enclaves & poor Black) & declining Black SE river counties (though I hold out tenuous hope that some Black pols will follow the lead of LA’s Elbert Guillory, since they will be completely shut out of power otherwise, and that’s not smart politics).