LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas voters will decide primary races Tuesday in two of the state’s four congressional districts.
Candidates in the 4th District Democratic primary are Q. Byrum Hurst, 63, of Hot Springs, a lawyer; Gene Jeffress, 63, of Louann, a state senator and retired teacher; and D.C. Morrison, 62, of Little Rock, an agricultural loan consultant.
Hurst has never held any political office. Jeffress is in his 10th year in the state Senate after serving four years in the state House. Morrison’s only previous political experience is his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 2010, in which he finished a distant third behind incumbent Blanche Lincoln, the winner, and then-Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. Lincoln lost in the general election to Republican John Boozman.
Morrison is running for the 4th District seat despite living outside the district. Federal law requires a congressional candidate to live in the state he or she is seeking to represent but does not require residence in the district.
Candidates in the 4th District Republican primary are Tom Cotton, 34, of Dardanelle, a Harvard Law School graduate and veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; John Cowart, 41, of Genoa, a Texarkana police officer and veteran of the Iraq War and the Persian Gulf War***; and Beth Anne Rankin, 41, the owner of a music company and a former Miss Arkansas and policy adviser to Gov. Mike Huckabee.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Cotton and Cowart have never held political office. Rankin was the Republican nominee for the 4th District seat two years ago but lost to Ross.
Ross has held the seat for the last 11 years. His successor will face the challenging task of defeating two primary opponents and a general-election opponent in a massive, 33-county district that, after redistricting, reaches from southeastern Arkansas to areas in the northwestern part of the state.
In the 1st District, three Democrats are vying to take on freshman Congressman Rick Crawford, the first Republican elected to Congress from eastern Arkansas since Reconstruction.
Republicans and Democrats both have three-way primaries to decide in the 4th District, where Democratic incumbent Mike Ross has chosen not to seek re-election — walking away from one of the few Southern congressional seats held by a Democrat and the only one in Arkansas.
Seeking the Democratic nomination in the 1st District are Scott Ellington 48, of Jonesboro, prosecuting attorney for Arkansas’ 2nd Judicial District; Clark Hall 64, of Marvell, a Democratic state representative, farmer and former Marvell mayor; and Gary Latanich, 64, of Jonesboro, a professor of economics at Arkansas State University and Vietnam veteran.
Ellington is in his second year as prosecutor. He is best known for brokering a plea deal with the men known as the West Memphis Three after they spent 18 years in prison in the 1993 deaths of three West Memphis second-graders.
Hall is in his third two-year term in the state House and is prevented by term limits from seeking a fourth. He was at the forefront of the congressional redistricting process in the Legislature last year, authoring both a rejected map that would have added Fayetteville to the 4th District — known as the “Fayetteville finger” — and the map the Legislature ultimately approved, which keeps Fayetteville in the 3rd District.
Latanich has not previously held any public office but served on former Gov. Bill Clinton’s Economic Advisory Board as an economic forecaster.
The winner will challenge Crawford, 46, of Jonesboro, in November. Political observers say Crawford may be the state’s most vulnerable congressional incumbent as he fights to retain a district that has been redrawn to include three Delta counties in southeastern Arkansas that traditionally favor Democrats.
A two-week early-voting period ends Monday. Polls will be open Tuesday from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
This article has been corrected from its orginal version. To view the corrrection notice, click here.