Diana Gonzales Worthen, the Democratic candidate for House District 9, answers questions at a Northwest Arkansas candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of Washington County Oct. 8, 2024 at the Fayetteville Public Library. On Nov. 5, Gonzales Worthen won her race, becoming the state’s first Latina lawmaker and the only Democrat to win a Republican-held Arkansas legislative seat in 2024. (Antoinette Grajeda/Arkansas Advocate)
Democratic Party of Arkansas leaders partly attribute their few successes in this month’s elections, specifically in the state House of Representatives, to a cash infusion from the national party.
The state party applied for and received a $59,500 State Party Innovation Fund (SPIF) grant from the Democratic National Committee “to hire staff who would coordinate volunteers and organize direct voter contact in targeted areas,” the party wrote in response to a list of questions from the Advocate. The party also was able to pay off some debt thanks to DNC funding and regular donors, leaving more room to invest in electioneering.
“Three years ago, it was grim,” party chairman Grant Tennille said Friday. “We were broke, and we rebuilt the thing piece by piece by piece. We saw this time some of the impact of all of that hard work. We spent more than [we did] in 2022 to support our candidates, we defended three seats that [Republicans] were absolutely positive they were going to take from us, and we won one.”
The DNC’s SPIF program is aimed specifically at state-level organizing efforts to get Democrats elected to state and federal offices. The Democratic Party of Arkansas received the funds Sept. 25, according to its third-quarter report to the Secretary of State’s office.
This year’s $59,500 exceeded the amounts the state party received from the DNC in the previous three election years: $55,000 in 2018 and $15,000 each in 2020 and 2022.
Party executives put the money not only into new staff compensation but also into advertising, printed materials and text-messaging efforts to connect with voters directly, and this directly helped the party meet some of its goals, Tennille said.
Democrats retained control of two Delta districts with the city of West Memphis split between them, neither of which had an incumbent defending the seat. They also retained a Conway seat by a much larger margin than the previous 10-vote win in 2022, and they flipped the state’s first and majority-Latino district in Springdale.
Diana Gonzales Worthen, who unseated Republican Rep. DeAnna Hodges by 472 votes in a rematch of the district’s 2022 race, will be the first Latina in the Arkansas Legislature. Her win, combined with no blue-to-red flips, marked Democrats’ first net gain in legislative races since 2004, though Republicans’ supermajority in both chambers remains.
Arkansas Democrats looked for a silver lining Tuesday night, cite legislative gains
The DNC contribution allowed the state party to hire its first Spanish-speaking organizer, and this contributed to Gonzales Worthen’s win, Tennille said during a party-wide Zoom conference on Wednesday.
Gonzales Worthen previously had unsuccessful bids for the House in 2006 and the Arkansas Senate in 2012.
Running for office several times gave Gonzales Worthen both the name recognition and learning experiences to finally win, Tennille said Friday.
“She just kept chipping away at that seat, and finally hard work and shifting demographics paid off for her,” he said.
“Chipping away” is one of Democrats’ goals, Tennille said, in a state with a decade of GOP legislative control, as well as a full slate of Republicans in constitutional offices and congressional seats.
Tennille said on Election Night that the Democratic Party of Arkansas is “learning new ways to campaign” and prioritizing knocking on voters’ doors to discuss what issues matter to them face to face.
The party’s messaging isn’t always how “impressive” a candidate’s credentials and values are, since that’s not always enough to surmount “the money and how firmly entrenched the partisanship is in [an] area,” Tennille said.
“We’re not as well-funded as our opponents are… but we’ve got to put the scant resources exactly where we think they’ll do the most good,” he said.
The party had $78,000 on hand in 2022, which was less than some House candidates spent on their races this year, said Will Watson, the state party’s strategic director, during Wednesday’s conference call. The party also fielded 72 candidates this year, a notable increase from previous election years.
Nationally, Republicans reclaimed the White House and the U.S. Senate while retaining the U.S. House. Watson pointed out that Arkansas was not the only state that saw state-level Democratic gains while its voters chose Republicans for higher offices, and he said a challenge for the party will be emphasizing how its policies are “better for working-class voters and working-class Arkansans” in the context of values that many voters in the state vote against.
Three years ago, it was grim. We were broke, and we rebuilt the thing piece by piece by piece. We saw this time some of the impact of all of that hard work.
– Grant Tennille, Democratic Party of Arkansas chairman
Competitive districts
Democrats lost four state House seats in the 2022 elections, partly due to redistricting after the 2020 U.S. census.
The current district map favors Republicans, Tennille said, such as in House District 62. The Delta district stretches over all or part of six counties. In 2022, Rep. Mark McElroy of Tillar became the first Republican to win a contested race representing a portion of the district since Reconstruction.
McElroy defeated Democrat Dexter Miller in 2022 by 197 votes and again this month by 663 votes. As a former Democrat, McElroy having “friends on all sides” probably helped him solidify his position in the district despite representing only a sliver of it before redistricting, Tennille said.
He also said the state party put effort into House District 62, a “profoundly difficult” district geographically.
“We’ve got some structural problems down there, but I still believe it’s winnable,” Tennille said. “I also know it’s tough to communicate with voters across [six] counties, particularly if you’re underfunded and can’t rely on mail and digital advertising to help spread your message.”
District boundaries won’t change until the 2032 election cycle, but in the meantime Democrats can work to change things “inside the map,” starting with knocking on voters’ doors and starting conversations with them — a challenge in rural areas where residences can be a quarter of a mile apart, Tennille said.
Concerns about LEARNS Act, abortion make some GOP-held Arkansas legislative races competitive
Voters in competitive GOP-held Central and Northwest Arkansas districts were willing to respond to Democratic candidates who met them where they were, according to those candidates, even though they were ultimately unsuccessful on Nov. 5.
The party had three core policy messages it urged candidates to publicly support: reproductive rights, government transparency and public education, all of which were at the forefront of competitive races.
All three issues were the subjects of citizen-led ballot measures, mostly state constitutional amendments, that ultimately did not make the statewide ballot. However, the canvassing efforts for the proposals left the Democratic Party of Arkansas with experienced individuals to hire with the DNC funds for voter engagement late in the game, Tennille said.
“They were already incredibly comfortable with knocking on a stranger’s door in the middle of the day and talking to them about some political or policy issue, which is the hardest thing,” he said. “…Having the ability to hire some people who were already pretty good at it meant they were able to work with some people who have never done it before, train them up and get them out there.”
DNC-funded staffers weren’t allowed to engage directly with candidates’ campaigns, but Representative-elect Jessie McGruder of Marion said he appreciated the party’s investment in two open Crittenden County House seats, one of which he won by 120 votes.
McGruder also said his concerted effort to meet voters at their homes or in public paid off.
“A lot of people said they hadn’t met a candidate in years,” McGruder said in an interview Friday. “They loved seeing the signs in their community, but they had no idea who the candidate was or is.”
Crittenden County saw a legal battle in the weeks leading up to Nov. 5 over two proposed early voting sites in West Memphis. The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in October that the county must provide the two sites after a 2-1 majority of the election commissioners had initially opposed this.
Bentonville attorney Jen Standerfer represented the plaintiffs in the litigation. Tennille said Wednesday that the party “had [its] act together early enough and had the money” for Standerfer to serve as its “voter protection attorney.”
The state Democratic Party’s grassroots efforts weren’t limited to competitive districts. Tennille said the party worked to gain support in rural districts too Republican for them to win this year, and he expects precinct-level voting data to show some success in that effort.
“It wasn’t about winning, unfortunately, but increasing the market share of Democrats in those areas, and that’s how we’re going to get to where we’re going to go,” he said.
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