Liberal self destruction

Michael Barone:

Liberal commentators like to spotlight rifts in the Republican party and self-destructive fights among various flavors of conservatives. In this they often have legitimate raw material to work with.

But I haven’t seen so much introspection in those quarters when liberals do similar things. Case in point: Arkansas, where New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/05/28/are-dems-killing-off-sen-mark-pryor/ Mayors Against Illegal Guns is running ads against Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, who voted against the Manchin-Toomey gun control proposal. These ads could hurt Pryor and, as Time’s Michael Scherer points out http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/28/bloombergs-gamble-risking-the-democratic-senate-majority-for-gun-control/, reduce Democrats’ chances of holding onto a Senate majority in the 2014 election.

The chance of Bloomberg’s ads producing an Arkansas senator willing to vote for gun control measures is close to zero. This is a state which has become increasingly Republican in presidential elections since Bill Clinton has been ineligible to run–it went 51%-46% Republican in 2000, 54%-45% in 2004, 59%-39% in 2008 and 61%-37% in 2012. The only other state to trend Republican in those four elections is Al Gore’s Tennessee: the Clinton-Gore ticket held much of the Upper South for Democrats in the 1990s but has moved sharply away from them ever since.

Nevertheless liberals tried a similar gambit in Arkansas in 2010. Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln, up for reelection, riled the unions by coming out early against their card check bill. Again, there was no way an Arkansas senator was going to vote for that. But Lincoln got primary opposition from the more liberal Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who lost by only a 52%-48% margin. Lincoln then lost the general election to Republican Rep. John Boozman by a 58%-37% margin, a crushing defeat for a two-term incumbent who was Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. There’s no reason to believe that Halter would have done substantially better.
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The Democrat base in the state is shrinking to a few liberals.  Pryor is a moderate to conservative Democrat and if they can't tolerate that, they are likely to lose this seat.   The number of Democrats voting in the state's primary has shrunk dramatically since Clinton was last elected.