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Do Democrats have a chance to flip a Senate seat in Arkansas? One poll this week suggested they might—stunningly finding that Republican Senator Tom Cotton is trailing his Democratic opponent in the deep red state. Experts say not to take it too seriously: The poll is almost certainly an outlier. But, they add, there might be some useful lessons in it.
This week, Talk Business & Politics and Hendrix College released a survey of 1,217 likely Arkansas voters, finding that Democrat Hallie Shoffner, a farmer and businesswoman, was narrowly ahead of Cotton in the race for Senate. 47.4 percent of respondents said they would vote for Shoffner, and 44 percent backed Cotton. That’s a shocking result; the Cook Political Report considers the Arkansas race a “Solid Republican,” and another poll of likely voters found Cotton ahead by 16 points. Arkansas has been solidly red for around 15 years, and the last time the state elected a Democratic senator was in 2008.
So why does it look like a Democrat has a chance? One answer can be found in the nature of polling itself. “People like to sometimes call polling a prediction. It’s not a prediction, it’s a measurement,” said Robert Coon, managing partner with Impact Management Group, who helped craft the questions for the poll. The poll doesn’t necessarily reflect how Arkansans will vote on November 3, but instead captures how they feel in the present, before spending and advertising has kicked into high gear.
“There’s a ton of time between now and the general election,” said Jay Barth, a professor of politics at Hendrix College who helped design the poll. “Tom Cotton has dramatically more resources than Shoffner.”
Cotton ended June with nearly $10 million in cash on hand. Shoffner had just $864,000. In the 45 to 60 days before the election, both campaigns will likely start spending their money in earnest, putting up more TV ads and sending out mailers. According to Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University, most voters don’t start paying full attention to the candidates until at least September; it’s not unusual for earlier polls to yield some bizarre results.
So far in 2026, polls have already proven to be bad predictors of how voters actually behave in the ballot box. In Michigan’s Senate primary, polls predicted that Abdul El-Sayed would defeat Haley Stevens in a blowout. Instead, he won by just one percentage point. A similar phenomenon happened in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary, where Francesca Hong was widely expected to beat David Crowley by double digits according to polling; she ultimately lost by less than one percentage point.
“People definitely shouldn’t overweight what one poll says, and there will obviously be more outside polls [and] inside polls that are done,” said Coon. “Really, it’s about a trend line.”
Still, the poll suggests that independents in Arkansas are increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump and the war in Iran. “Over the last eight election cycles, independent voters have traditionally [leaned] two to one with Republicans,” Coon explained. In this poll though, independents supported the Democratic candidate at a roughly two to one margin.
Even if Shoffner isn’t headed to a shocking win in a solidly red state, the poll still offers some useful guidance for the campaigns as they hurtle toward November. Cotton seems to be underperforming in the fast-growing Northwest Arkansas region, Barth explained. Shoffner has spent time in that part of the state, which could be paying off. But as spending increases, Cotton may put more resources into that area. Shoffner was also doing better with voters in suburbs around Little Rock than Democrats have done in past cycles. That could be because those areas are becoming more and more racially diverse and thus more Democratic, he suggested. Unsurprisingly, Cotton did well among voters 65 and older, a reliably Republican demographic in the state.
In November, independent voters will be the most important group to watch. Barth wonders whether the shifting attitudes among independents could be an early sign of the state becoming less red. “As there starts to be partisan change in a state or in a place, one of the first things we see is those independents start to kind of lean towards one party or the other,” he said. “And I think we are maybe seeing with younger voters some enhanced Democratic lean in response to frustrations with the Republican administration.”
—Emma Janssen
Outside Washington
Xavier Becerra’s senior slump of a “campaign” for California governor continues, to sporadic outbursts of frustration from commentators. Reviewing the Democrat’s almost comically vague statements on everything from AI to gas cars to housing, CalMatters’s Jeanne Kuang notes that Becerra is practically guaranteed to “win based on Democrats’ voter registration advantage in California alone.” Political science professor Melissa Michelson tells Kuang that Becerra “doesn’t have an incentive to go out on a limb,” since the only thing he can do is “mess up.” It’s possible Becerra has taken that message a little too seriously: The Sacramento Bee’s Ben Paviour notes that Becerra has clocked “almost no public appearances” since his June primary win. Despite that, Capitol Weekly’s Dan Morain calculates that Becerra’s campaign raised $1.9 million “in the first 15 days of August” alone. While Becerra has said he’ll debate his Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, they have yet to set a date. “I still don’t really know why Becerra is running and have no expectation that I’ll get an answer before he becomes governor, or even after,” Californian policy analyst Ned Resnikoff recently wrote on Bluesky. “This is a campaign for governor. Not a coronation,” griped Mark Z. Barabak at the Los Angeles Times.
“Cities are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to address one of the most persistent sources of housing permitting delays: incomplete applications,” reports Robbie Sequeira at Stateline. Baltimore, Denver, and Los Angeles are some of the recent converts, joining many others who have already adopted or are exploring the option. Honolulu and Seattle have both reportedly reviewed the accuracy of the permitting tool CivCheck, finding it somewhere between 87 percent and 92 percent accurate while shortening review time—but no one seems to think it can fully replace human review.
—Heather Souvaine Horn
In a new report for the Roosevelt Institute, Diana Hernandez and Lauren Ross argue that energy insecurity is no longer an issue just for low-income households, but is in fact a growing “mainstream crisis” driven not just by “rising utility rates, inflation, stagnant wages,” but also “outdated” housing stock and heating and cooling systems. Not much remains of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, they acknowledge, but some lessons can be pulled from the wreckage. Among them: Cross-agency cooperation between bodies like the Department of Energy and Department of Housing and Urban Development better facilitates “whole-home retrofits,” which are likely to be the most effective in achieving “lasting reductions in energy consumption and improv[ing] overall housing quality.”
Damian Murphy, Allison McManus, and Andrew Miller pen an article for the Center for American Progress evaluating the Iran war at the half-year mark. The bottom line: “Six months in, Iran has emerged as the strategic victor, and the longer the Trump administration fails to reach a durable conclusion to the conflict, the more the United States stands to lose.”
—Heather Souvaine Horn
In Closing
Good Week: Angie Nixon
Florida Representative Angie Nixon’s win in the U.S. Senate Democratic primary in Florida was very surprising. Her opponent, Eugene Vindman, had a massive fundraising advantage. Nixon is a Democratic Socialists of America member and Vindman from the center-left Resistance wing of the party, so this is being covered as an ideological result, another win for the surging left. That’s true. But another explanation is that Nixon is fairly rooted in Florida and the political scene there, while Vindman is more of a national, D.C., MSNBC figure.
Bad Week: Natalie Harp
It’s not just that Jon Ossoff made a quip about her that turned into days of news coverage. It’s that many of the salacious, unflattering details that emerged about Harp must have come from other people inside the Trump White House. Her enemies are not only Democrats! That said, she truly seems to have an audience of one and there is little evidence that the president wants Harp to leave his side.
—Perry Bacon
Political Trivia Question of the Day
On this date in 1858, the first of seven of these historic events took place. What events were these? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)
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