Maya Porter of Fayetteville writes to alert me to her recent letter-to-the-editor informing anyone who might be interested that Arkansas allows crossover voting in primaries.
Her point is that, even if you are a highly partisan Democrat or Republican, the state allows you to mess around in the other primary. You need only to be willing to give up expressing yourself in your own primary.
You may not pick and choose between parties and mark two ballots. You must declare yourself a Democrat or a Republican, if only for a day, at which point you'll be directed to that party's ballot and only that ballot.
You can't declare as an "R" for purposes of voting against U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, which is what Porter has in mind, then grab a "D" ballot to vote for, say, Nicole Clowney--Yale-educated and a lawyer who teaches Greek and Latin at the University of Arkansas--for the state Legislature.
Porter is a semi-retired freelance editor who has lived in Arkansas since 2000. She can be forgiven for not knowing that, in 1990, either Skip Rutherford or I--or both--championed a triumphant crossover effort into the Republican gubernatorial primary. The point was not partisan, but to take the earliest and most convenient and effective shot at relieving the state of the existential threat of Tommy Robinson's governorship.
Robinson was a Democratic sheriff of Pulaski County who chained prisoners to a fence of a state prison and uttered racial slurs against a federal judge, for starters. Then he got elected as a Democrat to Congress where he distinguished himself for prolific check-writing at the House Bank and defecting to the Republicans midterm in a ballyhooed White House ceremony.
He did so at the behest of the late Republican attack specialist, Lee Atwater, who thought Robinson was just the right agent to take out the young governor in Arkansas, Bill Clinton, whom Atwater saw, rightly, as the Democrats' best emerging presidential prospect.
I wrote several columns encouraging Democrats to abandon their own primary, ask for a Republican ballot and mark it solely for Sheffield Nelson, thus against Robinson, in the governor's race.
There is some local thought that, while I wrote to champion the scheme, the brainchild was Rutherford's.
That's probably so. Rutherford is more given to brainchildren, and I am more given to hearing a good idea and writing about it. Perhaps that's how it worked.
Speaking of how it worked ... it did so rather nicely.
Before Arkansas went off the red cliff, the state's Republican primaries were pitiably anemic affairs. The GOP governor's primary in 1986 drew only about 19,000 voters. Nelson-Robinson drew 87,000--more than a third higher than the GOP presidential primary turnout two years earlier.
Nelson got about 8,100 more votes than Robinson. About 28,000 of that turnout came in Pulaski County, which gave Nelson an 8,300-vote advantage.
I'm not saying that Democratic crossovers in Pulaski County took out Tommy Robinson in the Republican primary. I'm saying you could argue that.
About three weeks out, Bill and Hillary got so worried about their voters crossing over to vote against Robinson that they began pleading for Democrats not to go. For good measure, Hillary just so happened to walk past a state Capitol news conference conducted by her husband's Democratic opponent, the late Tom McRae, and interrupt and broadside him right then and there.
Today I'd be a tad more cautious about advocating exploitation of election laws.
But the purpose then was noble: Robinson would have been a reckless and surely disastrous governor. Taking him out in the smaller universe of the GOP primary--when fewer anti-Robinson votes could carry a greater wallop--was not funny business. It was the Lord's work.
Alas, the dynamic does not re-arise with Womack in the 3rd District and his rare Republican opponent, Robb Ryerse.
Womack is not a special threat. He is but a garden-variety Trump sellout, a scowling French Hill.
Anyway, there probably aren't enough Democratic crossovers in Northwest Arkansas to beat his solid Republican numbers. And that Democratic legislative primary in Fayetteville's most decidedly Democratic district between Clowney and Mark Kinion is interesting, hard-fought and tantamount to election. Democrats won't want to give up a voice in that.
Democrats in Benton County, growing but without a local Democratic primary, might pack a substantial wallop if crossing over. Substantial, but not sufficient.
Crossover voting is pointless on an individual basis on whim. It must be coordinated with a passion and purpose. Just another Trump acolyte voting to destroy health insurance and explode the deficit doesn't cut it.
The main worry among Democrats contemplating crossover voting in 1990, as I recall, was that being a Republican, if only for a day, might go on their permanent record. But I know of no lingering "Scarlet R."
St. Peter would understand.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/24/2018