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And hello again everyone and thanks very much for being with us.

Political pros were a bit surprised couple of weeks ago when voter turn out exceeded expectations.

So what was behind that surge?

Can it continue through the runoff primary and into November?

And even if it does, can that offset what is typically a rather lower turn out than many other states record?

And it is of course a midterm year, so to what extent is that a reflection of voter registration?

In which Arkansas is near the bottom, we'll get to that in a moment.

Up top, though, whether some current events in Washington can affect either registration or turn out or both hearings into the January 6th assault on the US Capitol, televised in prime time by a Select Committee that none of our four congressmen voted to create, can those meetings move the needle either left or right?

Well joining us from the left, Democratic consultant Michael Cook.

And from the right GOP strategist, Richard Bearden gentlemen.

Thanks very much for coming in Michael.

We'll start with you because the Democrats do control the house.

Therefore they control the committee.

Your first thoughts on the on this first night of hearing.

It was a fascinating hearing in terms of all the facts that were laid out in terms of telling the story.

Not only happened what on Jan happened on January the 6th, but Liz Channing, the Republican one of the Republicans on the committee.

Her laying out that this was a coordinated.

Plan, it wasn't just a one day event where things got kind of out of hand that there was a whole strategy from Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party to frankly throw a bloodless coup to you, know everybody around they should.

I like how they showed they had the words of his attorney General, Bill Barr saying this, there was no fraud in the election.

It was all basically fair and square.

Everybody was telling President Trump it was a fair election.

You lost, but he kept telling the lie because he refused.

To believe it and tried to take over the reins of government and completely subvert our democracy so utterly fascinating hearing.

And I look forward to what the other hearings holds.

Richard Beard, Michael Cook, along with ten other people, may be looking forward to a fascinating week of TV.

I think there it was.

It was interesting to watch.

Is it going to move the needle in Arkansas one way or the other?

I don't think so.

I think the people that have already made their mind up about what happened was wrong, probably cemented their views a little deeper.

For those that think somehow another, this election was skewed or stolen.

Nothing changed again.

I think it's.

Very much like the Watergate hearings, it was it that the hearings needed to be had.

The facts needed to be laid out.

What was it a made for?

Prime time TV?

You know exposure.

I think that remains to be seen as one of the national pundits could have been me put the question or or or positive the people that the Democrats most want to watch.

These hearings probably aren't going to watch.

You know we we focus so much on you know the ratings as it gonna move the needle and Arkansas I I think we lose sight of the bigger picture with these day-to-day back and forth of, you know the ratings good as new information we came so close to losing our democracy to having our government completely overthrown.

And yeah, I agree Richard won't move the needle in Arkansas 11 iota in in any way won't affect any of the races.

For governor of the US Senate, we all know how these are gonna go, but I think we we're losing sight of the bigger picture of how close we were.

A few different things had changed.

We would not have the democracy that we were supposed to have.

The first time, you know, we we America has always prided ourselves of having a transfer peaceful transfer of power.

We certainly didn't have it this last time.

That would seem though gentlemen to be a pretty hard sell in today's climate.

That that democracy was literally at stake, which would Bearden well.

I mean, I I agree.

First of all, do you?

Do you concur with that?

And I I do.

I think it was a it was a sort of a black eye.

On the process, you know.

Nixon resigned before he was impeached, you know.

But since that time we've had two other impeachments of President.

So now it's become.

If you don't like the way the president's doing thing, let's impeach him on this charge of that charge.

So I do think that the political discourse probably sunk a little bit beneath the waves.

On January the 6th, I remember my business partner and I were sitting there watching as it unfurled, and it was sort of like.

This is surreal.

I think it was the Washington Post that did.

A lengthy expose and if you read that as Michael alluded to, a lot of pre planning went into this.

I don't think it was just some rally where folks got a little amped up and and broke into the capital and and I do think the American people need to read and understand and see what happened.

I just don't know that last night I mean at one point the chairman after the police officers testimony, he said boy that is fascinating to have heard.

I mean, you know they were reading the teleprompter.

I just don't know at the end of the day that the average.

Voter, mom and pop out there.

Watch that and went good gravy.

I've got to go learn more about what happened.

Yeah, there was immediate even before the 1st.

Even before the gavel came down there was a counteroffensive by let's call them Trump loyalists.

Who who sought to delegitimize the proceedings?

It does suffer, though, does it not, at least in public perceptions.

Michael Cook in that.

This committee was created with zero Republican but well, two Republican votes.

I think this first of all, and none from Arkansas, by the way, right right?

You know, the the fact that it is a bipartisan committee.

There are Republican members on the committee, both identified as rhinos.

But but they're still, they're still remembers the publican party.

That's the, you know, whether you whether Republicans like them or not.

They were elected as Republicans, but also, Republicans made a tactical mistake way back when on the national level, because they could have had more control or more.

Way in the middle of it, we don't need to get to all the the the back behind the scenes stuff but they they made a mistake and didn't try to put more members on that committee and but at the end of the day, they're still telling the story of what happened on January the 6th and all the planning that went up into this.

This attempted coup.

Yeah, Richard Bearden, 50 years go ahead.

I'm sorry.

Well about, say I saw Congressman Scalise tweeted this morning is are these Congress going to have a hearing on where?

How inflation is at a 40 year high and you know what happened?

The baby formula crisis.

So again, I think the the the the hearing is important.

Is that a prime time?

You know this is gonna change the midterm elections, probably not, but I think in this environment we're in very politically charged.

If you, if you're on the right, you think?

Gosh, terrible, but we got to move on.

And if you're on the left, it's the most important thing out there.

I think that just really says where the the sort of polarization of our country is right now in terms of politics.

50 some of us.

Remember, 50 a half century ago.

It pains us through half century ago.

There was a similar sort of hearing and the gentleman who sat in Congress for South Arkansas.

Mr Thornton at the time was on on that on that panel.

Great was profoundly bipartisan.

There was a spirited opposition from within that side.

The from the Republican side of of the Watergate Select Committee.

Richard, you just mentioned polarization.

1/2 century makes a lot of difference.

Alright certainly has it.

Does Steve and I think to some degree you've got that 24 hour news cycle.

There's constantly something to comment on and I just think it drives.

You know my parents didn't watch Fox News.

They're retired.

They watch Fox News.

Other folks didn't watch CNN all day, and that's what drives the story.

And it's not really even news making as much as it is a political commentator.

Being paid to sort of, you know, fire up an audience so they get good ratings.

And I think that sort of has.

It has and is what drives a lot of public opinion these days.

It's those snippets on a national cable shows about what happened or didn't happen in their view.

In terms of Arkansas politics the this year, one candidate in November in particular has strong ties to Mr Trump, and of course, that's Miss Sanders, the Republican gubernatorial nominee.

Do you see these hearings we've only had at this hour?

We only had one night of them.

Michael, do you see any impact at all on her?

Ohh, not at all.

You know, I think these these hearings will have an impact nationally in Arkansas.

It it won't make a difference.

We kind of see where the where, where the train is is heading down the tracks on that on that race.

For governor.

I I don't think it makes 1 bit of difference to where Arkansas voters are.

Unfortunately, for for Democrats and and democracy in general, I believe in my opinion.

But no, it won't have any impact.

Is your beard not?

Can't imagine you disagree with that.

I can't and look.

I would say this you if you.

If you watch the Sarah Huckabee Sanders commercials it was really just at the very end.

There was a picture of she and President Trump walking.

I think in the colonnade there at the White House on The West Wing she was going to win the Republican nomination.

I think she's going to win this fall with high numbers whether without President Trump's endorsement.

I would also make the argument Senator Bozeman was in a closer than expected race.

There was a lot to be made of his endorsement by President Trump, but I would make the argument.

That the endorsement of Senator Cotton and Sarah Huckabee Sanders made as much of a difference as Donald Trump's endorsement.

And I say that because there were two other candidates that sort of inferred an endorsement by Donald Trump.

One was Conrad Reynolds.

He ran for the 2nd District Congress.

The other was a candidate for Secretary of State and both of them lost very handily, so I think Donald Trump here, even among Republicans, is somewhat of a mixed bag.

And again, I can make the argument that Sarah Huckabee Sanders won of her own accord, and it's not going to make one of much of a difference this fall.

Whether she is or isn't formally endorsed by Donald Trump.

Where do you see?

What's the temperature right now is after a first primary anyway in Arkansas, and things sort of settle down a little bit, I think.

Apparently, yes.

I mean after the after a big primary, no matter who wins or loses, everybody just wants to first of all, just take a break after these intense, unless you're in a runoff.

Unless you're a runoff, you know there there are a few of those around the state.

Most, I think almost all Republican runoffs.

The few that are.

But I think it's you know, having running campaigns for many years at this point, campaigns are kind of for the ones that have the November elections, they're retooling what worked.

What didn't work?

Do we tweak our message?

We got to, we got to raise money all over again.

You gotta get organized so you have a lot of people behind the scenes working hard trying to get their candidates elected again.

Yeah, Richard Bearden, you get the last word.

Well, I agree.

I mean, it's it's a.

It's a money game and I think you'll see both.

All of the candidates out there trying to reload their campaign coffers.

So it's it's a non stop process.

But again, I think it's going to be a big year for Republicans this year.

And and you know, no really surprises this fall.

Jeff, thanks for coming in.

As always, we'll see you back here again soon.

Thank you and we'll be right back.

We are back and now to the matter of May turn out and the June follow up to the November outlook and our comparatively low participation rate.

A pair of veteran scholars of Arkansas politics with us now from the political science department at UCLA.

Doctor Heather Yates.

And from the university at Fayetteville, doctor Janine Perry, doctors thank you very much for being with us.

Heather, let's begin with you.

If we may, the the the may turn out the primary turn out.

Surprised a lot of people for its for its vigor and we, we outperformed.

I think projections, your thoughts on why?

And can that carry forward into the June runoff?

So Arkansas numbers in did exceed projection and this exceeds the number of turn out of voters from 2010, and I think some context is important here because in 2010 that was also a year of vigor because of the Obama administration's healthcare reform that mobilized a lot of interest and it mobilized a lot of voters in the midterm.

So this time around we have that increased vigor and 2022.

For different reasons, but the context is still there, so we've got high profile candidates in Arkansas.

We have a race at the top of the ticket, a gubernatorial race, and we know from previous history of of elections that anytime that there is a race at the top of the ticket that does attract voters, we also have a unique context in which we are conducting this election.

This is the first midterm this election after the presidential race of 2020, and so there is a couple of factors.

There's a couple of moods in the electorate.

One is going to be a higher sense of threat perception that is always going to mobilize voters to the polls.

There's also on the same emotional dimension here to to discuss his enthusiasm.

Arkansas does have two historic gubernatorial candidates in the Democratic and the Republican columns that is also going to generate the the electoral turn out.

We saw comparatively moving forward into November.

We we are going to see maybe the the same vigor.

It's hard to tell, but we also do need to acknowledge that.

The electorate looks very different in a primary than the general election.

The primary electorate is going to be the party base, the partisan loyalists.

The rank and file.

These are going to be the voters of high, high knowledge.

They're paying attention to the races in November, the general election electorate looks a little different, so it it we might have a little bit of a a suppressed vote.

There, it's it's.

It'll remain to be seen, but we are in the general election cycle, and so there's going to be a lot of things.

Happened between now and November that could affect mobilization.

Yeah, Jennine Perry, were you surprised at all by the June by the May turn out?

Uh, I wasn't.

I knew from just glancing at 20 years of Arkansas turnout and then what we're able to gather from national averages, which is pretty rough since primaries are intraparty affairs and then they're at different times, right across different states.

But Arkansas has on average been lower than the national average, but it's varied tremendously.

I mean, the lowest figure I found was 15% turn out in the primary of 2000 and the highest was 30% in 2016.

So projections of between 20 and 23% for this one seemed pretty much on target.

So as coming in at 26% of registered voters you know was a little surprising.

But we know in the national climate that we think of the states that have voted so far that turn out has been up, maybe around 10% on average.

That's not consistent across the states.

In California it was down, but I looked up a few, you know that were significantly up, like Arkansas, you know four or five points which matters when turn out is this low?

Iowa, Idaho, Texas, North Carolina.

We're all up by several digits, so it seems to be part of a national pattern.

Yeah, I would know.

Georgia too, really surprised a lot of people.

Yes, and I mean there are different dynamics happening in Georgia.

Sure, because you don't just want to look at overall turn out.

You also wanna look out look at turn out inside each of the primaries and something I thought was quite interesting here.

Something I was looking ahead to getting the data about was about the total turnout in the Democratic primary as compared to this year as compared to 2018 and the number of Democrats participating actually.

Dropped out this year compared to 2018, whereas so so most of that increase right?

All that increase really was coming on the Republican side and just to give that a little more context, rod numbers aren't always helpful to us.

But about two out of every 3 voters in the primary of 2018 voted on the Republican side.

This time, eight out of 10 voted on the Republican side.

I think there are a number of interesting reasons for that, but that was a very dramatic shift in a short period of time.

We have our Speaking of the Republican side, well, particularly the Republican side.

A number of legislative candidates in runoffs this month, and the challenge will for both sides, but particularly the incumbent.

Some are incumbents captured and runoffs and and the challenge is going to be to animate that base, motivate that base to get back out both sides.

Heather Yates.

Whenever we have a race where we've got especially a runoff, you've got incumbents.

You've also got not just in Arkansas, but in other states throughout the South and and elsewhere where incumbents are facing off because of gerrymandered districts.

So whenever there is a runoff election, it is harder like you said, to mobilize voters to then turn around 3:00 or 4 weeks later and Arkansas it's June 21st, so it's roughly about 30 days later.

So that really is a heavy mantle.

On the campaigns right to then, drum up more interest and mobilization.

Have people go out to the polls again to vote.

It's it's increasingly more difficult, and it's a it's a heavy lift on those campaigns.

Jennine Perry.

It certainly is it.

It's going to come down in some of those races you know to to probably literally dozens of votes because it's so hard to get people out again, like it summers in full swing it cetera.

So it's really about those those those loyalists and and I also would just say this looks a lot like what we have in recorded history about Arkansas for most of the 20th century, particularly at the the middle part where you would have 6789 candidates on the democratic side.

No candidates or one candidate on the Republican side, and so everything was an intra party affair, and you know general election turn out was low and we look destined for that here to see that.

Same thing in Arkansas, just in reverse.

And that's not atypical.

There are now.

It's a I think, a record high, at least for contemporary history of what we call trifectas in state government.

So the State House, the state Senate and the governor are all.

Republican at this time.

I mean, you go back to the early 90s and that was only true of three states.

It's now almost half the States and together with gerrymandering and those other institutional mechanisms that Republicans have just been better at using more sophisticated than Democrats were when when they had a more trifectas, that's just going to take this whole thing.

I think further into the future and make these intraparty contests the first time and then into runoffs.

Really, the main event in a lot of American states.

Including Arkansas, of course, the big statutory change in any any election schematic, of course, is the is the decennial redistricting, which we've just had, but Arkansas, as you mentioned, last so many other states has adjusted.

Let's put it that way.

It's it's laws governing voter registration and voter participation.

What impact do you think doctors we're likely to see in the next well this year and in the foreseeable future, owing to what the General Assembly has done, Heather Yates will begin with you.

So looking at the garden variety of legislation that was proposed and then subsequently passed, we see that a lot of the laws target the infrastructure surrounding election management, not in in Arkansas specifically, not so much making and registration more difficult because there's already a a gatekeeping process that it it makes registration difficult.

For example, we don't have online registration, we have.

Very limited outlets in which somebody can get registered.

Putting that aside, the legislation that we are seeing focuses on mail in ballots, absentee ballots.

Last fall, a national report came out that ranked Arkansas 50 out of 50 on both voting vote registered voters, so voting eligible population.

Secondly, Arkansas had the highest rate of rejection on absentee ballots, and so the state legislation focuses in targets.

That absentee ballot it does so through making it easier to reject an absentee ballot.

It also reduces the threshold from of 10 ballots to 5 ballots in possession of a single person in order to identify an intent to commit voter fraud.

That's a very different threshold.

We've also got legislation that gives the state board an Arkansas control or the ability to take control of county elections.

In management, So what that means in some is that it's a consolidation of election management at the state level instead of the confederal operation of having county clerks being that autonomous, election management agent and that could actually have a very big impact going into November that we didn't see in May.

Jeanine Pirro I can see you nodding in in in agreement there I think.

I am.

I was also just gonna follow up on what Doctor Gates said, which is we wouldn't expect most of those modest but additional obstacles to make much of a difference in primary elections because as she pointed out earlier, those are not your garden variety voters.

There's very little that's going to deter them from participating, but it's in general elections where decades of political science research, looking at the tremendous variety among states in terms of who has many obstacles, who has few obstacles.

We can look at the levers of when states reduce obstacles and increase obstacles, and we know that more obstacles are reduces.

Turn out in general elections, and it particularly reduces turn out among lower income, younger, lower levels of just sort of less established in their communities.

People who are the ones who kind of get drawn in and out of elections anyway.

So if we do see an effect, it's likely that we'll see it actually in the in the general election it we won't be able to parse it out from.

The fact that our Kansas, again a one party monopoly in the other direction and that tends to dramatically depress general election, turn out we won't be able to to to tell what's causing what, but it'll it'll play a part, probably in low voter.

Turn out in the general election relative to other states, as is Arkansas's long history.

Yeah, a couple of minutes remaining you, of course you can't participate unless you're at the polls anyway.

Unless you're registered and our registration rate has has been fairly anemic over the decades.

What is it gonna take to juice that up?

Or do you see anything?

Is is the jaundice out there so profound that we're not likely to move that needle?

Janine Perry.

Well, it's just a long pattern.

I mean, the two major predictors of participation, whether that's registration or then following through on registration right historically have been education and income, and Arkansas historically has been among the lowest states in both respects, so we really shouldn't expect anything different.

You compound that with this prolonged I guess experience with one party monopoly, which also tends to depress a turn out.

As I mentioned earlier.

And I just don't think that there's much we can do.

Other than to change the levers and make it easier right to reduce obstacles, we know from other states again that that would increase voter turn out, but I that doesn't really seem to be the direction that this legislature and this political climate is headed.

Dates you get the last word.

And to build upon the points brought forward by Doctor Perry is.

There's also a lot of obstacles in rural areas.

There's a rural versus urban or exurban divide here because of the state of Arkansas has also technological issues with getting broadband out to the rural parts of Arkansas.

And since Arkansas does not have online registration, getting rule voters and also the demographics, we know that 18 to 25 year olds are are notoriously.

The demographic that don't participate don't mobilize and hardest to get registered to vote, and so there's also a lot of talk in the state about expanding broadband access, and so there's some very practical technological aspects that present this barrier to voting, and I should also mention I and I neglected to mention earlier, but the state legislature also reduced the window of early voting from 30 days to three weeks, and that will also, I think, have a more pronounced impact in November than it did in May for all the aforementioned.

Reasons we said earlier, but there's a real challenge at getting rural voters registered and access to polling sites right?

Wish we could go on got into there because the clock is stopping us.

Janine Perry and Heather Yates.

Thanks very much for being with us.

Come back soon.

Thank you and that will do it for us for this week.

As always, thanks for watching.

See you next week.

Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

The Arkansas Times and KUARFM 89.