A Prairie Populist in Crimson-Red Arkansas

It’s been more than a decade since a Democrat has held statewide office in Arkansas. Long gone are the days of two-term Gov. Mike Beebe sweeping every county in the state in 2010, trouncing his Republican opponent by 30 points despite the GOP enjoying a wave year almost everywhere else. Distant is the memory of the nearly ten-year stretch at the turn of the 21st century when Arkansans had two sitting Democratic senators repping Bill Clinton’s home turf, before both lost back-to-back re-election efforts by 20 points.

But a recent shock poll has given Arkansas Democrats a glimmer of hope that their long slide could reverse in November. An August survey out of Hendrix College showed Hallie Shoffner, a former rice and soybean farmer from the Arkansas Delta and the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, leading Republican incumbent Tom Cotton by three points.

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Those numbers, worthy of a double take as they might be, have led Cotton’s campaign to pour money into millions of dollars in negative ads, outpacing Shoffner’s media buys by a whopping 65-to-1. The more than $10 million that Cotton has spent on the race, much of it bundled for the Iran hawk and Senate Intelligence Committee chair by defense contractors and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has far eclipsed recent head-to-heads for the state’s Senate seats, which have been assumed safe for Republicans for a long time. Meanwhile, Cotton has spent nearly as much as four other high-profile Republican Senate candidates, each now fending off “prairie populist” challenges from Democrats and Democratic-friendly independents in Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, and Idaho, combined. GOP PAC spending for Cotton has also exceeded expenditures in each of those states except Nebraska, where independent Dan Osborn has led incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts in multiple polls and outside money has surged to boost Ricketts, who got a visit from President Trump at a rally this week. Cotton’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Shoffner has managed to raise a couple million dollars from an army of small donors and a handful of local Democratic committees, advocacy groups, and unions. Aside from the endorsement of Jon Tester, the former Democratic senator from Montana (and fellow farmer), the national party so far hasn’t shown much interest in the race.

On the campaign trail, Shoffner has been tapping into the century-old themes of now-resurgent prairie populism––anti-monopoly, antitrust, anti-establishment––focusing the campaign on her experience as a sixth-generation farmer and on the punishing agriculture crisis that has the state leading the nation in a number of ignominious stats, including farmer suicides and bankruptcies.

Shoffner, as she tells it, is painfully and personally aware of those numbers. Early last year, after a string of losses and a bad revenue forecast, she was forced to shut down her family’s soybean farm, which she had been running for close to ten years. As she sold off everything from the farm except for the land, she started posting to Substack about the agonizing economics of farming in America. Those essays caught the attention of the organizers of a town hall at First United Methodist Church in Little Rock, who invited Shoffner to speak. “I originally said no, that I really didn’t feel comfortable speaking about it, but my mom was the one who suggested that it really would be good if I did it,” Shoffner said in an interview with the Prospect. And so she did, just days after liquidating the last of the farm’s 300-horsepower tractors at an auction.

Also invited to the meeting were Cotton and Arkansas’s other senator John Boozman (R-AR). Neither showed up. “They were a few miles away at a re-election fundraiser for Tom Cotton at $7,000 a plate,” Shoffner told the Prospect. She decided to address the elephants not in the room. “I don’t care if you have an R or D next to your name,” Shoffner told the crowd. “I am sick of politicians playing dress-up in cowboy boots and saying they care about farmers and then do nothing in our hour of need.” After that, someone came up to Shoffner and asked her whether she had considered running for office. She announced her candidacy four months later.

In her bid to represent a state whose economic lifeblood is agriculture, Shoffner has been pitching a total reset in federal farm policy that boils down to a pithy premise: “We don’t want bailouts. We want markets.” Failing to pass the congressionally negotiated omnibus farm bill package for the past three years, the federal government has instead relied on billions in ad hoc emergency spending to offset shocks from the Trump administration’s global tariffs and spiking fuel costs downstream of the Iran war. Shoffner says those do little to solve the systemic pressures farmers have been facing for years and are now buckling under.

“The help that is sent to them from the federal government, whether that’s in the form of a bridge payment or a subsidy, it hits our bank account for 12 hours, and then it goes out to Big Ag,” she says. “Whether it’s the John Deere multi-use account or Nutrien or Simplot or an equipment payment or a bank payment, we feel like we’re not the ones benefiting from the stimulus that’s coming into the agricultural economy right now, which, to be clear, is just pennies on the dollar of what we actually need.”

The status quo, Shoffner says, is dominated by monopolies all the way down, which the federal government has shown scarce interest in addressing with available antitrust tools. This includes seed and fertilizer and machinery companies on the input side, meatpackers and processors and retailers on the output side, and even the concentrated networks supplying farm credit for the whole enterprise.

The result is bare subsistence for farmers and a food supply chain “that’s more focused on shelf life and processed food than it is freshly grown, regionally produced American agricultural products,” Shoffner explains. The answer is “for the government to do its job and create new markets, de-risk market building, especially on the domestic side.”

In Shoffner’s telling, the path to getting there involves a combination of antitrust enforcement, investments in research, development, and infrastructure, incentives for building out agricultural diversification and regional food systems, and reforming the patenting process for seeds, which, she says, has allowed “companies to keep repatenting seed genetics and then charging farmers a licensing fee” when they grow the actual crops. A bill introduced this past summer by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Peter Welch (D-VT) would take steps to do that, though it’s been stuck in committee for months and has little chance of becoming law anytime soon.

Rice is one of Arkansas’s major crops, accounting for about half of U.S. domestic production. Each year, the low-lying, water-rich plains of the Arkansas Delta yield hundreds of millions of bushels of standard long- and medium-grain white rice, but only a handful of specialty growers in Arkansas are set up to produce consumer favorites like basmati and jasmine. Arkansas farmers wind up exporting about 40 percent of what they produce to foreign markets, but with federal investments to help them diversify their crop, they could become more competitive in the U.S.

“The costs are so high that that’s a barrier to entry for small companies to get in and compete for market share,” Shoffner said. “There are lots of ways we can allow new businesses to compete in these industries, but not if we keep letting big companies write the rules so that they can just buy up any competitor and either shelve the product or mark it up for a higher price.”

Shoffner isn’t the only farmer-turned-candidate barnstorming against Big Ag and trying to break the affinity between food growers and the GOP. She has company with Jamie Ager, a dairy farmer running for the House in western North Carolina; Don Coover, a Kansas cattle rancher also running for the House; and Clayton Tucker, a Texas rancher running to be the state’s next agriculture commissioner.

In Arkansas, that message seems to be resonating. A recent ad put out by Shoffner’s campaign features a cattle rancher and former Cotton voter, who bashes the senator for voting down the farm bill twice and abandoning the state. “We’re crying out for someone who believes that the purpose of government is to solve problems and make progress, and not just posture around for the next election,” said Shoffner. “I think Arkansans are hungry for that kind of conversation.”