Womack gets primaried

Steve Brawner

No member of Congress wants to get “primaried,” but that’s what’s happened to U.S. Rep. Steve Womack.

The verb “primaried” means “when an incumbent faces a challenger from their own party” with the implication often being that the challenger will be able to run a more ideologically pure and partisan campaign than the incumbent can. Incumbents have had to govern.

Members of Congress go to great lengths to avoid being primaried because they know it’s the most likely path to losing.

General elections are usually fairly easy for incumbents to win. Most U.S. House districts are heavily weighted toward one party. The nonpartisan election reform group FairVote found that last year, the average margin of victory in congressional races nationwide was 28 percent. In Arkansas, the four Republican incumbents beat their Democratic challengers by an average of 37 percent. This nationwide, district- by-district one-party dominance has several causes. Among them is the fact that people tend to live near others who share their values and experiences and vote like they do, and it shows up on Election Day.

Another is gerrymandering. After each census, the party in power in most states strategically redraws the congressional district lines to help it win as many races as possible. In Arkansas, Republican state legislators redrew the lines to make it easier for U.S. Rep. French Hill to keep his 2nd District seat, to which he has been consistently re-elected anyway.

Given that the November election is usually pretty easy, members of Congress are most vulnerable in their own party primary, where fewer voters participate, and — as a whole — they are more partisan than the general voting population.

How much fewer? There are roughly 750,000 Arkansans in each congressional district — many of them ineligible to vote for various reasons. In the November 2022 general election, 223,588 voted in Womack’s 3rd District. Only 77,228 had voted in the earlier primary election, which Womack won easily with 60,814 votes.

Womack was re-elected with the votes of a little more than 8 percent of the district’s total population. In other words, it wouldn’t have taken much to beat him. Turnout will be higher this year because it’s a presidential election, but it still will be much smaller than the general election.

Incumbents over time make some voters mad when they inevitably have to compromise with the other party. Partly to inoculate themselves, they take meaningless, partisan, hard-line votes and make many partisan, hard-line statements.

But sometimes they might mess up and go off script. Womack, who has been in Congress since 2011, lately has expressed some opinions about the need for a functioning process rather than taking the safer route of simply blaming Democrats for everything. More importantly, he was one of a couple dozen Republicans who blocked the election of Rep. Jim Jordan, a major supporter of former President Trump, as speaker of the House.

Womack thus has made himself more vulnerable than he might have been. Now he faces a tougher challenge than he did in 2022, this time by state Sen. Clint Penzo of Springdale. Penzo is younger than Womack, he hasn’t been through the bruising and dispiriting battles that Womack has, and he will have the luxury of attacking both Womack and Washington. His website says he has a “strong conservative record of fighting for individual and limited government, opposing vaccine mandates, and opposing tax increases.”

It’s still unknown how strong a race he’ll be able to run. He jumped in very late and has not filed a campaign finance report with the Federal Election Commission. The election is only three months away, so he doesn’t have much time to raise money or build an organization.

Ultimately, the election might be a referendum on how many voters are mad enough at Womack and Washington that they instead would vote for a candidate they know little about.

If I were a betting man, I’d put money on Womack. On the other hand, if I’d bet much money on politics in recent years, I’d be broke.

••• Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 15 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.