2014 Arkansas Senate - Cotton vs. Pryor

11/3/14 -- Tom Cotton seems to be breaking open a real lead here. He enters Election Day as the favorite.

10/7/14 -- Subsequent polling has not borne out the findings of the Suffolk poll. Mark Pryor enters the home stretch clearly behind Rep. Tom Cotton.

9/29/14 -- The recent Suffolk poll seems like an outlier, although we can’t be completely certain until we get more polling. Even that poll showed Pryor receiving only 45 percent of the vote. The incumbent is in deep trouble.

9/7/14 -- Two months before the election, Pryor still seems to be stuck at 43 percent. There's still plenty of room for him to win this race, but he remains the most vulnerable incumbent.

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When David Pryor won his Senate seat in 1978, Arkansas was still very much a one-party state. Republicans won only six seats that year in the entire 135-member state legislature, although this tied a record set in 1910. Only one Republican had won the governorship since the end of Reconstruction, and only one other Republican had even eclipsed the 40 percent mark. Likewise, only one Republican had bested 40 percent a Senate race since the beginning of direct election of senators in the 1910s.

Defense Impacts: An incumbent defense appropriator faces an Iraq War veteran and rising star in a race the GOP needs to win the Senate.

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Pryor’s son, Mark, won his Senate seat in 2002 in a somewhat different reality. Republicans had won gubernatorial elections in 1980 and 1998, and had narrowly won a Senate election in 1996. But the state was still politically marginal in presidential elections, and was still strongly Democratic in state elections. Mark Pryor defeated Republican Tim Hutchinson in a good Republican year, and found himself unopposed in 2008.

But things have changed dramatically in Arkansas politics in the years since then. Pryor’s colleague, Blanche Lambert Lincoln, lost her 2010 re-election bid by over 20 points, while Republicans captured the General Assembly two years later. A body that had 97 Democrats and 30 Republicans when Pryor was elected now stands at 73 Republicans and 61 Democrats.

Pryor finds himself challenged by freshman Rep. Tom Cotton, one of the NRSC’s strongest recruits. Cotton brings a sterling resume – he’s a former Army captain and Harvard Law School graduate – as well as the benefit of having represented southern Arkansas in Congress, which is a swing area of the state where Democrats must over-perform in order to win. A recent spate of polling has shown Pryor ahead. He’s still at only 44 percent in the RCP Average, and the recent PPP poll shows the president’s job approval an awful 13 percent among undecided voters, suggesting that Pryor will have a tough time converting them to his cause. Still, his campaign is showing some signs of life that weren’t really there a month ago.