By Steve Brawner
A catalyst is a substance that increases the speed of a chemical reaction without itself being consumed. For example, add zeolite to crude oil and you get gasoline.
Catalysts effect change in politics, too. Take the Republican Party of Arkansas. For decades, party activists have wondered why their culturally conservative state has been so slow to switch its allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans, as other Southern states have done.
What the process has lacked is a catalyst — something to make the change happen faster, to turn crude oil into gasoline. And so while Arkansas voters have supported Republican presidential candidates in increasing numbers (51 percent in 2000, 54 percent in 2004, and 59 percent in 2008), they haven’t switched their loyalties nearly so much at the state and local levels.
But a catalyst exists in 2010: President Obama’s unpopularity in Arkansas should enable the Republican Party to win seats in the state Capitol and in local races.
Obama won only 39 percent of the vote last November, and he is less popular now. An October 2009 Talk Business Quarterly poll found that half of Arkansans strongly disapprove of his job performance, and 46 percent have a strongly unfavorable opinion of him personally.
Apparently about half of Arkansans, fairly or not, have largely made up their minds about him, but he will not be on the ballot next year. Legislative candidates, however, will, and for some voters, this will be a referendum on him, not them.
Why do so many Arkansans dislike Obama so strongly? Many are probably impatient that he hasn’t solved the problems he inherited from his predecessor — many of which, by the way, his predecessor also inherited. Some genuinely oppose his health care reforms and other proposals. Some can’t forgive his cultural liberalism and cosmopolitan outlook; no other president of the last 50 years, except Nixon, would fit in worse at the Gillette Coon Supper.
And of course, race can’t be discounted. In a recent nationwide Rasmussen poll, 98 percent of African-Americans said they approve of Obama’s performance while 37 percent of white voters do. Gallup found similar numbers in November. That’s not to suggest that all or even most whites who oppose Obama do so because of race. But policy differences alone don’t explain a 61-point spread.
Arkansas Democrats have other realities working against them, not the least of which is the march of time. Simply put, the “yellow dog Democrats” are dying. Many of those who grew up under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and marched off to war at age 20 in 1942 with him as their commander-in-chief were reliable Democrats the next six decades, right up until the 2000 elections, when Al Gore was competitive against George Bush. That was the year that those voters reached what is now the average American life expectancy, 78. It was more than nine years ago.
It will be difficult for the GOP to screw this up, but it probably will try. Catalysts also can slow the rate of change, and the party has employed plenty of those — by focusing on the ticket-topping glamor races while ignoring the grass roots, and by nominating arch-conservative candidates who appeal to narrow slices of the electorate.
The ultimate catalysts are the candidates themselves. Good Republicans can accelerate the growth of their party; good Democrats can increase the size of theirs. Regardless, both will be competing in an election where half of all Arkansans personally dislike the nation’s most prominent Democrat.
That would matter in any election. In 2010, rightly or wrongly, it could turn crude oil into gasoline.
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Steve Brawner is a freelance journalist, a former newspaper editor, and aide to former Gov. Mike Huckabee. His e-mail address is brawnersteve@mac.com.
