Even solidly red Saline County saw a shift toward Democrats in Arkansas’ midterm election

Located a short drive from Democrat-leaning Little Rock, Saline County has been a Republican stronghold of central Arkansas for years. The county hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection, and has been the epicenter of fights over book restrictions.

But an unexpected thing happened in the county that Donald Trump won with 69% of the vote just two years ago. The county’s voters swung 17 percentage points in favor of Democrats. The GOP nominees for U.S. House and Senate saw their numbers drop from two years ago, and a Republican state lawmaker in the county barely survived a bid to oust him. 

And a Republican-led effort to cut the county’s library funding failed.

The results don’t amount to a blue wave in a county where Republicans still control county offices. But last week’s midterms in Saline County highlight how even the reddest of counties were touched by an election where Republicans suffered major losses around the country.

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Former state Republican party chairman Richard Bearden said it’s too early to draw conclusions about Arkansas’ political trajectory.

“I don’t know that we can look at one election cycle and say, ‘Golly, the state’s trending back to being sort of a yellow-dog Democrat state that it was 20 years ago,’” Bearden said.

National polling has indicated that Democrats’ takeover of congressional seats and governor’s races across was a repudiation of the president and his policies. Arkansas voters chose Trump in the past three presidential elections, winning about 69% of Saline County’s vote each time.

Despite Democrats’ attempts to tie U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and U.S. Rep. French Hill to the increasingly unpopular Trump, Saline County’s double-digit voter shift isn’t necessarily a rebuke of the president, at least not in elections for state-level offices, said Shane Broadway, chairman of the Saline County Economic Development Corporation.

“One thing I noticed watching all of the ads [was], especially on the Democratic side, they were focusing on costs of gas, groceries, those kinds of things, and nobody ever mentioned Donald Trump on either side,” Broadway said.

But Republican Sen. Kim Hammer of Benton, who won his race for secretary of state last week, said Saline County voters’ leftward shift might have been simply “a protest vote” against Trump. 

Nearly 44,000 Saline County residents voted in the midterms, with nearly 34,000 setting a county record for early voter turnout, County Clerk Doug Curtis posted on Facebook. Turnout is typically lower in midterms than general elections, and nearly 58,000 Saline County residents voted in 2024.

Broadway, a former longtime Democratic state legislator and former House speaker, said his decades of experience in Arkansas politics have taught him that the state’s voters “tend to have an independent streak.”

“I’ve seen red waves, I’ve seen blue waves, and I’ve seen a lot of times where Arkansas was not a part of either,” he said.

Changes in northeast Saline County

Republicans kept all 13 seats on the Saline County Quorum Court, with seven members and the county judge running unopposed. All six state House seats and both Senate seats in the county will continue to be held by Republicans.

But GOP Rep. RJ Hawk of Bryant won reelection over Democrat Gina Thomas-Littlejohn by only 96 votes, two years after he defeated her by more than 2,300 votes.

Hawk’s razor-thin victory in the Saline County district closest to Little Rock came on a night when most of the state capital’s northern suburbs voted blue. Democrats flipped two House seats and one Senate seat in north Pulaski County, breaking Republicans’ House supermajority with 10 House seat flips statewide.

Democrats nationwide ran on lowering the cost of necessities such as gasoline and healthcare. Saline County residents of all political persuasions shared frustrations about the cost of living, said Thomas-Littlejohn, a former Alexander city council member, and Joshua Irby, a Democratic first-time candidate who ran for Hammer’s Senate seat.

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“Some Republicans [said] they have voted Democrat this year,” Thomas-Littlejohn said. “I’ve never heard that before. The two years prior, I never heard that.”

Bearden said independents who voted Republican in the past likely chose to vote Democrat this year because they believed the GOP wasn’t sufficiently “addressing kitchen table issues.”

Demographic changes in Saline County might have played a role in the election results. The northeast part of the county that includes Bryant, Alexander and Shannon Hills has seen an influx of new residents moving from Little Rock seeking a lower cost of living, said Thomas-Littlejohn and Lela Chism, who won a Shannon Hills city council seat last week.

This means the area doesn’t have the “reactionary Republican voting base” present in other parts of Saline County, so voters are less receptive to right-wing talking points about immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community, said Chism, one of the most vocal opponents of the failed ballot measure to reduce library funding.

“The culture stuff might hype you up and get reactionary people out to the polls because it scares them, but the policy itself isn’t popular,” she said.

Increased Democratic presence

Democrats held a majority of Arkansas’ state and federal offices from 2006 to 2012, but Republicans had taken over by 2014. The Democratic Party of Saline County “pretty much died out” around that time, said Broadway, who unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor in 2010.

However, the party has been rebuilding a presence in the county over the past few years. Broadway said he’s seen Saline County Democrats man booths at local festivals, and Thomas-Littlejohn said the party knocked down a wall in its Benton headquarters to make room for new members.

Chism said the issues that motivated Arkansas’ Democratic voters this year are not going away anytime soon.

“If the Republicans in Arkansas continue to neglect the needs of working people and average people, they’re going to lose again,” said Chism, who ran for a quorum court seat as a Democrat in 2024.

The four Saline County quorum court members who ran in both 2024 and 2026 defeated their Democratic opponents by lower margins this year, according to the secretary of state’s website.

Hammer said he believes Democrats’ progress in Saline County will be short-lived over the next two years.

“I think we’re going to see the pendulum swing back the other direction because people will realize we were going in the right direction” under Republican leadership, Hammer said.

Saline County Sheriff Rodney Wright defeated Irby in the race for Hammer’s Senate seat, but Wright received 3,321 fewer votes than Hammer did in 2022.

Irby said he learned while campaigning that Arkansans want “solutions and not sound bites” from their elected officials.

“People are just feeling like, ‘Where’s the help?’” Irby said. “Where are the people who are representing us, and what are they doing to improve this situation? I think that was the key takeaway, the biggest concern anyone and everyone had.”