AP Decision Notes: What to expect in Arkansas’ state primaries

Arkansas gears up for primary elections on Tuesday, with voters set to choose nominees for a full range of federal, state, and local offices. The primary victors will advance to November’s midterm elections in a state that has been a Republican stronghold for over a decade, with no Democrat elected to statewide office since 2010.

Republican U.S. Senator Tom Cotton is seeking his third term and faces two primary challengers. On the Democratic side, Lewisville Mayor Ethan Dunbar and farmer and small business owner Hallie Shoffner are competing for the nomination to challenge Cotton in November.

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is running for reelection in 2026, faces no opposition in the Republican primary. Several other Republican incumbents, including the lieutenant governor, attorney general, auditor, and treasurer, are also running unopposed in their primary races.

The Democratic gubernatorial primary features State Senator Fred Love and magazine publisher Supha Xayprasith-Mays, who are competing for the chance to challenge Sanders in November. Xayprasith-Mays previously ran in 2022 but finished fourth in that Democratic primary.

Other contested primaries include races for secretary of state, commissioner of state lands, two U.S. House seats, and more than two dozen state legislative positions in both the Senate and House.

Competitive statewide primaries have become increasingly rare in Arkansas in recent years. Senator Cotton ran unopposed in both his 2014 and 2020 primaries, while Governor Sanders and U.S. Senator John Boozman won their 2022 primaries with commanding majorities of 83% and 66% respectively.

Pulaski County, which includes the state capital Little Rock, is Arkansas’s most populous county and typically its most Democratic-leaning area. Vice President Kamala Harris had her strongest showing in the state there during the 2024 presidential race. Democratic primaries tend to be more influenced by voters in Pulaski and other Democratic-leaning counties than Republican primaries.

In the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Marco Rubio won Pulaski County but still finished third statewide behind Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. While Pulaski was Trump’s worst-performing county in that primary, he carried it along with all other Arkansas counties in his 2024 primary against Nikki Haley, demonstrating the state’s increasingly Republican tilt.

Arkansas election rules require a candidate to receive more than 50% of the primary vote to avoid a runoff. If no candidate clears this threshold, the top two finishers will advance to a runoff election scheduled for March 31.

The state has approximately 1.8 million registered voters. In the 2022 primaries, about 348,000 voters participated in the Republican contest, while around 94,000 voted in the Democratic primary. Early voting data for this year’s primaries shows more than 61,000 Democratic ballots and approximately 125,500 Republican ballots had already been cast by Saturday.

Arkansas does not automatically conduct recounts, though candidates can request them at their own expense, with costs refunded if the outcome changes. The state also has unique rules regarding primary participation—while Democrats allow registered Republicans to vote in their primaries, Republicans adopted a rule last June prohibiting registered Democrats from participating in Republican primaries.

Polls close at 7:30 p.m. local time (8:30 p.m. ET), with early and absentee votes typically reported in the first vote updates of the evening. In the 2022 gubernatorial primary, results began being reported 15 minutes after polls closed, with nearly all votes counted by early the following morning.

The outcome of these primaries will set the stage for the November midterm elections, now 245 days away, as Arkansas continues its decade-long trend of Republican dominance in state politics.