Predictions: Prison stays stuck, Dems win U.S. House

By STEVE BRAWNER

A recent column of mine asked questions about what might happen in Arkansas this year. Let’s go a step further and make some actual predictions, starting with …

– The March 3 primaries will produce no big surprises and generate a voter turnout of about 20%. Sen. Tom Cotton and Rep. French Hill easily will win their contests. State Sen. Fred Love, D-Mablevale, will be the Democratic nominee for governor, while Hallie Shoffner will be the Democrats’ U.S. Senate nominee. Chris Jones will be the nominee to face Hill in the 2nd District.

State Sens. Bryan King, R-Green Forest, and Ronald Caldwell, R-Wynne, both will win their primary races. Those are the two Republican state senators who voted against Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ $800 million prison last year and who face primary opponents.

– Also in March, the Arkansas Razorbacks’ basketball team will make the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament. 

The NCAA, meanwhile, will continue seeking a way out of its self-created mess where “student-athletes” can earn millions of dollars to play for a school one year and then transfer to another school the next. It will look to Congress to craft a solution, which won’t happen.

– Speaking of that $800 million prison, lawmakers won’t fully fund it when they meet in fiscal session starting April 8. Instead, the funding will get stuck in the Senate, like it did last year, and/or the House. The Legislature instead again will fund the project enough to keep it alive. 

Also, more Republican lawmakers will ask more questions about the increasing costs of Sanders’ educational freedom accounts, although they won’t outright oppose them. Created by the 2023 LEARNS Act, the accounts provide state funding for private and homeschooling expenses. The program’s cost this year has ballooned past the original $187 million state appropriation, requiring lawmakers to twice approve more funding. It’s now up to $309.4 million this fiscal year.

Furthermore, when the next school year starts in August, the number of families using the educational freedom accounts will increase, but at a much slower rate than it did this year, which was the first when all students were eligible. The numbers will start to plateau, as most families will continue to choose traditional public schools.

– The November general election will produce no big surprises in Arkansas. Sanders easily will win re-election as governor. Cotton will defeat Shoffner, although she will do better than other statewide Democrats have done in a while. She might make 40% or a little higher, but I’m going to say 38%. Hill will win 57% of the vote in his 2nd District race.

– While all six members of the state’s congressional delegation will return to Congress, Republicans nationwide will maintain their majority only in the Senate. The president’s party normally loses during midterm elections, but Senate Republicans have a fairly secure 53-47 majority. That means Cotton will remain Senate Intelligence Committee chair, while Sen. John Boozman will remain chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.

House Republicans, however, will not maintain their slim 218-213 majority (with four vacancies). Democrats will pick up enough seats to regain control. It won’t be a 40-seat landslide because the country is too divided and the congressional districts too gerrymandered – in other words, drawn to benefit a state’s dominant party. But it will be enough for Republicans to become the minority party, and for Hill and the rest of Arkansas’ House delegation to lose their committee and subcommittee chairmanships. 

– Republicans will try to push through whatever legislation they can between the November election and the beginning of January. But Democrats will still have the filibuster in the Senate, and at that point Trump will have lost some of his grip on the Republican Party. Time in office along with a party losing in elections will do that.

– One other election footnote: The Libertarian Party of Arkansas finally will win 3% of the vote in the governor’s race. As a result, it won’t have to collect signatures to qualify for the ballot in 2028.

– Finally, the Razorbacks football team will go 4-8. That’s a guess, and maybe a pessimistic one, but I see at most three games on the schedule where the Hogs would be favored based on last year’s results. So, maybe it’s actually optimistic.

Of course, last year’s results won’t tell us much about this year with a new head coach and all these transfers coming in and going out. 

That’s college football now. At year’s end, the NCAA will still be a mess and will still be hoping in vain for Congress to act.

Steve Brawner’s column is syndicated to 21 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.