When the U.S. Senate race was called by the networks for Tom Cotton on Tuesday night, the first-term congressman made history, marking the first time since Reconstruction that Arkansas will have two Republican senators serving together.
For more than a century, starting in 1879, the southern state elected exclusively Democratic senators. Republican Tim Hutchinson broke that streak in 1997 when he won an open seat vacated by David Pryor.
But in 2002, Pryor’s son Mark Pryor defeated Hutchinson to recapture the seat held by his father, returning to the Arkansas normal of Democratic senators. Until Republican John Boozman trounced Blanche Lincoln in the 2010 wave.
Now, Cotton’s comfortable victory over Pryor has completed Arkansas’s long realignment from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican stronghold.
“Arkansas has historically been an odd state,” said Andrew Dowdle, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas. “It has traditionally had been Democratic but it has elected Democrats who ran as conservatives or moderates. As late as 2006 Arkansas very much looked like a one party Democratic state. Over the last eight years you’ve seen a realignment.”
It’s not just the Senate delegation: if Cotton’s safe Republican seat stays with the GOP, and the other incumbents hang on, every House seat in Arkansas will also be held by a Republican come January, for the first time since 1873.
“I will serve and rep every Arkansan. Democrat, Republican and everyone else,” Cotton said in his victory speech. “Tonight, this victory belongs to you. The citizens of Arkansas. … And I will listen every day.”
Before the results came in, a Pryor aide said the campaign was well aware of the brutal partisan headwinds facing the senator: an unpopular second-term president, expected low turnout for Democrats and a state lurching to the GOP.
“If the climate were a little better,” the aide said, “it would not even be a contest.”
This article was updated at 10:24 p.m. ET to include Cotton’s victory remarks.
