Arkansas Democrats just flipped a Republican seat

It's the ninth red-to-blue pickup in a special election in Trump's second term

Arkansas Democrat Alex Holladay (at left) (credit: Alex Holladay Facebook)

Democrat Alex Holladay won a Republican-held seat in the Arkansas state House on Tuesday night, marking the ninth time Democrats have flipped a district from red to blue in a special election since the start of Donald Trump’s second term.

Holladay, a healthcare administrator, defeated businessman Bo Renshaw to capture the 70th District outside of Little Rock, a swingy constituency he had come close to winning in 2024.

In that race, state Rep. Carlton Wing held off Holladay by a slender 51-49 margin, just the latest in a series of difficult elections for the incumbent. With the possibility of another tough battle looming, Wing accepted an appointment to become head of Arkansas PBS last September, triggering a race to replace him.

Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, however, wasn’t eager to hold a special election and originally scheduled it for June 9—more than eight months after Wing’s departure, and, notably, after the legislature’s annual session is set to conclude.

But Arkansas Democrats sued, saying that Sanders’ long delay violated state law. A judge agreed and ordered the election be moved up to March 3, the same day as the state’s regularly scheduled primary.

If Sanders was worried about the GOP’s chances of holding Wing’s seat, she was right to be. The 70th District was the rare constituency that moved to the left in 2024.

Trump carried it 51-47 in 2020, according to data uploaded to Dave’s Redistricting App by the Voting and Election Science Team, but calculations from The Downballot show that Kamala Harris won it 50-48 four years later.

Since then, the political environment has only grown worse for Republicans, and Holladay made the most of that shift. Like successful Democrats across the country, he emphasized the cost-of-living crisis, which he said many voters closely linked to their opposition to a plan by Sanders to build an enormous prison in rural northwest Arkansas.

The proposal, Holladay told the Arkansas Advocate, rankled many people who are “struggling to go to the grocery store.”

“I’ve been surprised by the number of voters that bring it up,” he said. “I don’t even ask. They just bring it up because one of our [campaign] taglines is, ‘What matters to you?’”

While Republicans will retain their comfortable supermajority in the Arkansas House, they have yet to flip a single seat in a special election anywhere in the country since Trump was sworn in last year.

And overall, Democrats have continued their strong performances in special elections nationwide. According to The Downballot’s continually updated tracker, Democrats have run ahead of the 2024 presidential election results by an average of 13 points across more than 90 races this cycle.