Shifting parties

UA professor discusses quick voter switch in 3 election cycles.

A University of Arkansas professor on Wednesday lectured about the state’s rapid shift from being the ninth most Democratic state in 2009 to the ninth most Republican in 2015.

Dr. Janine A. Parry, the University Professor of Political Science at the University of Arkansas gave a talk titled “From the Bluest of Blue to the Reddest of Red? Quantifying and Contextualizing Arkansas’ Partisan Earthquake” during a meeting of The Political Animals Club at the Governor’s Mansion. Former Arkansas House Speaker Shane Broadway, the club’s chairman, introduced Parry, whom he said he’s known since she first came to Arkansas.

Parry teaches courses in Arkansas politics, gender and politics and American government at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She has directed the Diane D. Blair Center’s annual Arkansas Poll since its inception in 1999. Her research expertise is in state politics, voter behavior and gender.

Parry has served as a Fayetteville Public Library trustee and an election poll worker for Washington County. In 2020, the Arkansas Political Science Association awarded her its Distinguished Scholar Award.

As a scholar of comparative state politics, Parry sought to answer the question of whether Arkansas was “special” in its party transformation during the lecture.

Arkansas believes it’s special in many cases, she said, but rarely is the state as special as its residents think.

Rather, the state might be in the top 15 or the bottom 20, and Arkansas is almost never the first or last in any category, she said.

Parry then introduced three questions to prove whether Arkansas is, in fact, special.

“Was Arkansas’ party transformation the most? Was it the fastest? Was it the last in the South?” Parry asked. “We read a lot about it at the time, we talked a lot about it at the time, but not many of us are measuring it.”

“That’s because it’s a tedious thing to do,” she added. “But I’m a professor…I eat tedious for lunch.”

With the help of her research assistants, Parry started working on a data set tracking the percentage of Democrats in the state House of Representatives and Senate, the percentage of Democratic votes for Governor and President and the percentage of United States Congressional seats held by Democrats in each state since 1935.

After calculating the State Party Control index, an average of these percentages, for each state, Parry’s team created line graphs showing trends of how Democratic each state has been since the New Deal.

Showing a graph of California’s recent transformation from mostly Republican to mostly Democratic, Parry said her students are often surprised to hear the state had ever been more conservative. She said Vermont’s trend “shocks” her even more, as the state was mostly Republican as recently as the 1980s.

The states which capture national attention during election cycles are those appearing as a nearly flat line in her graphs, Parry said. These are states like Pennsylvania, which have almost evenly split Democratic and Republican in top-ticket races since 1935, according to her research.

Then, the professor showed the audience a slide demonstrating Arkansas’ shift toward the Republican Party. The graph resembled a steep drop in Democratic support starting in 2009, to which she asked, “Isn’t that amazing?”

“Well, by this measure, the answer is ‘Yes,” Parry said. “We are special.”

Arkansas went from Democratic to Republican in record time, Parry said. The state’s politics turned in only three election cycles — 2010, 2012 and 2014 — she said.

The professor said her research also shows that Arkansas was the last state in the South to undergo the transformation. To all three of her initial questions, the research answered, “Yes.”

When someone in the audience asked if Parry believed part of the reason Arkansas transformed so “fast” was because it was the “last,” the professor also answered, “Yes.”

She said when people talk about why the state’s politics changed, they often immediately “jump” to Barack Obama, the Affordable Care Act and the Tea Party’s reaction to his election. Parry referenced Obama’s approval rating nationally and in Arkansas. Almost every year, the state’s approval trailed the national number by double digits.

Instead, Parry proposed two “Arkansas-specific accelerants” in the state’s shift to predominantly Republican politics.

First, the campaign finance reform landscape changed dramatically right before the shift, she said. Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which ultimately made it easier for Republicans to afford television advertisements in up to seven or eight of Arkansas’ media markets, the number needed to reach 80 percent of voters.

Then, she said the state also separated its presidential primaries from other primaries in 2008. The decision made it possible for people to vote for different parties at the national and state levels.

However, the action also allowed the Republican Party to see clearly for the first time who its supporters in the presidential primaries were.

“That Democratic majority of Arkansas legislators in 2007 thought it was so smart, created a list of Arkansas ticket splitters in 2008 and handed it to the Republican Party, who suddenly had way more money than it had in quite some time,” Parry said. “And remember that a voter file also includes return addresses for all those people.”

“To me, it appears that the Democrats, I assume unwittingly, handed a bat to [former State Senator and former Arkansas Republican Party Chairman] Doyle Webb and his people and said, ‘Hit me as hard as you can!’” Parry said, smiling. “But that’s just a theory.”