•AR-Sen: If you've been wondering about Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor's surprising reversal of fortune in his difficult re-election campaign, this new piece from U.S. News probably does as decent a job as anyone can in trying to explain Pryor's return from the dead. There's no hard data here, so the thesis isn't falsifiable, but the authors argue that GOP Rep. Tom Cotton's "wooden and academic" style has made it hard for him to connect in a small state where parochial retail politics is still king.
Cotton's also been hurt, they say, by his lack of deep connections to Arkansas, and the fact that he's had to run ads trying to demonstrate his ties to his ostensible home state only underscores that this is an issue for him. Most interesting, though, is the argument that Pryor's remarks in early March, claiming Cotton has a "sense of entitlement" leading him to feel he should be elevated to the Senate because he served in the military, have actually undermined Cotton and not Pryor.
Originally many observers believed Pryor made an uncouth jab that would hurt him, but one unnamed Democrat suggests the comments actually "planted the necessary seed of doubt" about Cotton, and even thinks Pryor may have been playing a long game, accepting a "short-term hit" in exchange for a "long-term gain." And as he has with his Arkansas roots, Cotton has felt compelled to defend himself in TV advertisements against charges that he's overly ambitious, so perhaps the rebuke actually drew some blood. Again, this is all speculative and anecdotal, but Cotton certainly wouldn't be the first politician to run aground because of a relatability gap.