Cotton Rises in Arkansas

This fall, Republicans hope to claim Arkansas’s 4th Congressional District, one of the few Democratic redoubts in the South. Six-term incumbent Mike Ross is retiring, and the state legislature has redrawn the district’s lines to incorporate more Republican-friendly territory. In other words, it’s ripe for a pickup. And newcomer Tom Cotton may be just the man to win it.

The Republican primary has been a hard-fought contest between the 2010 GOP nominee, Beth Anne Rankin, and Cotton, an Iraq War veteran. But in the latest Talk-Business–Hendrix College poll, Cotton has posted an 18-point lead, 51–33, over Rankin. A third candidate, John Cowart, earns only 6 percent. If Cotton wins over 50 percent of the vote, he’ll secure the nomination; if Rankin holds him under that threshold, the race will go to a runoff.

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Obama’s Arkansas Problem

In West Virginia, federal inmate Keith Judd recently swiped 42 percent of Democratic votes from the president, indicating the level of dissatisfaction among the rank and file. And according to a Talk Business–Hendrix College poll conducted on May 10, Obama leads John Wolfe, a virtually unknown candidate, in Arkansas’s 4th congressional district by only 7 points, 45–38.

Three weeks earlier, the Talk Business–Hendrix College poll showed the president leading by 65–24 in the slightly less conservative 1st district, but that was before Obama declared his support for same-sex marriage.

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Defending Cruz

The Texas Conservatives Fund, a super PAC supporting Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst in the state’s Republican Senate primary, is attacking his main rival, former state solicitor general Ted Cruz. In a television ad airing throughout the Lone Star State, the fundderides Cruz’s reputation as a conservative. “Ted Cruz, a conservative?” the narrator asks. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

But it’s the ad’s charges that are laughable.

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Senate Free-for-All in

On Friday, roughly 2,200 Minnesota Republicans will assemble at their party’s state convention in St. Cloud to nominate a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Three men are vying for the nomination: Kurt Bills, a state representative from Rosemount; , an Iraq War veteran from Stillwater; and , a former state representative from Sauk Rapids. And according to several party insiders, the race is a dead heat. To win the nomination, a candidate must get 60 percent of the delegates’ votes, and because two of the candidates entered the campaign late, no one is walking into the convention with the nomination guaranteed. If no one wins the nod at the convention, the candidates will face off in an August primary. But Jeff Johnson, national committeeman for Minnesota, tells NRO he thinks Bills, who’s been endorsed by Texas congressman , has a slight edge.

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Why Lugar Lost

Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana lost his party’s nomination tonight because he had lost touch with the party’s grassroots.

Since his election to the Senate in 1976, Lugar had cut a profile as a moderate Republican: He had supported the ethanol mandate, backed the Brady Bill, and opposed the Iraq surge. In previous cycles, Republicans had forgiven Lugar his ideological transgressions, but in recent years, he had become more brazen. Not only did Lugar support the DREAM Act; he cosponsored it. Not only did he vote for New START, he spoke forcefully in its favor. True, Lugar wasn’t Arlen Specter — he opposed the stimulus and Obamacare — but his voting record was moderate enough to make him suspect.

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