Yes, you’re right about his high-handed management of the party into oblivion. That is truly Huckabee’s legacy to Arkansas Republicans.
I think now is the time to organize. My county, traditionally Democrat, went narrowly for McCain-Palin this year (at least it appears so far) yet went for Kerry in 2004. I’m going to compare vote totals from national/state/local races to see what kind of disconnect between the Democrats and the Arkansas voters can be nurtured.
Local organization will take awhile, but I want to start now so we’ll be ready when Zero the Magnificent starts stumbling and buyer remorse sets in.
What’s sad about the squandered legacy under Huckster is that the GOP had a premier opportunity with term limits implemented in the ‘90s to make substantial gains in the legislature, and most importantly in the rural areas. As it is, the Republicans are almost exclusively confined to the Little Rock area (4 counties in a line from east to west, from Garland’s Hot Springs through to Lonoke) and the NW corner and Ozarks along the MO and OK border. It’s almost impossible to find any elected Republicans outside those two areas (there were a few that made some breakthroughs, but the numbers shrunk down to just 25% of the House after hitting the 30% mark in 2000).
Upon just reviewing the AR Sec of State website, I see we gained 3 seats in the House (29th, 42nd, 49th) to go up to 28, which you’d be interested to know that’s the first time we had a positive gain in the legislature since 2000, but still below the highest number we held from 2001-05. The 3 gains we made, however, were still basically in those same areas I cited above. The 29th & 42nd in the L.R. suburbs, but the 49th in White County is now the easternmost county to have a GOP Rep. There still are zero in the southern 3rd of the state and in the East/NE. I believe we had one member from the Texarkana area in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s and another up in Poinsett or Craighead, IIRC, at the same time. We even had a Black Republican member from Fort Smith, Dr. Kevin Penix, but he retired just after a single term in 2004.
More appalling, though, is the fact the GOP didn’t even bother to field candidates in a jaw-dropping 61 seats ! Even the Green Party managed to elect a member in the 39th district (North Little Rock) which I think is a Black district, and the winner is White.
I see in the Senate we gained zilch, still stuck at the same 8 seats (out of 35) we’ve had since 2000, the last year we made any gains, and means we have even less a percentage of Republican Senators than House members. And we didn’t bother contesting 12 of 18 seats.
As you’re well aware, we didn’t even contest Pryor’s Senate seat, which we held 6 years ago, and didn’t bother with the other 3 House seats (for which we could win ALL of them, since they all voted GOP for President, or at least did in 2004). The Green Party contested more Congressional races than we did (3 out of 4), including the Senate (and no doubt, some disgruntled Republicans probably cast protest votes for the Green candidates).
In any event, I wish you good luck in getting involved with local GOP politics. The whole state party needs a gigantic kick in the butt. How Missouri to the north and Louisiana in the South could now have Republican majorities in one or both bodies of their legislatures while Arkansas gets left behind to numbers disproportionate to the actual number of voting Republicans is shameful. Over here in TN, we just finally took the House after 4 decades of Democrat gerrymandering (of course, deposing our tyrannical Dem Speaker is the next challenge in January).
Wait, a greenie won a state house seat? Ha.