Former Arkansas Democratic governor Jim Guy Tucker is dressed in a neat blue-and-white checked shirt and blue slacks, and is sitting in a chair next to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the Arkansas River. Thinking of an anecdote to explain his state, he is smiling.

“I used to kid all the time: Arkansas is small enough, hell, if you don’t know somebody, you’re at least related to ’em.”

It seems too homespun, until you connect some dots. I’m sitting opposite Tucker for the very first time because he goes to church with my uncle-in-law, who used to be a minister, which is when he met my stepfather-in-law, who used to preach at the historically black Allison Memorial Presbyterian, where he met Reverend Marion Humphrey, who later became a circuit court judge. Twenty-four hours later, I’ll see Humphrey’s face grinning up from a supreme court endorsement placed on my car outside a Hillary Clinton rally.

All those connected dots are there just for someone who isn’t even from here. So you can imagine how many radiate outward from someone who spent 12 years in the Governor’s Mansion, like Hillary Clinton. And, if you’re working for the Bernie Sanders campaign, you don’t have to. It’s a reality you face every day.

From 1976 to 1986, Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill ran a state-wide campaign every two years, from an early successful attorney general’s race to four successful gubernatorial races and one that failed, back when the state constitution limited the governor’s term to two years. Then there was the 1990 gubernatorial election, the 1992 presidential election, and again in 1996. Hillary participated in all of them.

In fact, the first time Tucker met her was in a debate “30-40 years ago. I was expecting Bill, and he sent her … and she stomped on me. She was well-prepared, and she went after me hard, and I was not prepared to respond. I have no question in that little mountain community she whipped me that day.”

I think everyone here has a story about how they’ve met the Clintons or seen the Clintons Hayden Cuffman, student

This familiarity extends beyond pols to virtually everybody. Arkansans will tell you the state doesn’t feel big. Subtract the factory farms, the agricultural land, the tree farms and mills, the broken ground of the mountains, and the population of nearly 3 million isn’t nearly so spread out. The Little Rock population of 190,000 feels downright cozy.

Criss-crossing the state nine times and living in the capital for 12 years was enough to give most people of a certain age their own proximal familiarity with the first family. It’s commonplace enough to make bringing it up feel tiresome if not gauche, in the same way that baristas in Hollywood learn that “I served a celebrity a latte” is something almost all of their peers can claim.

“I think everyone here has a story about how they’ve met the Clintons or seen the Clintons,” says Hayden Cuffman, a 24-year-old political science student at University of Arkansas-Little Rock, who has been volunteering for Bernie Sanders since January.

‘It can be really intimidating’

The Sanders campaign office on 2nd Street in downtown Little Rock sits about a 10-minute walk from the capitol building. The surrounding neighborhood – a mixture of parking lots, state offices and attorneys’ offices – is so quiet on weekends that a toddler could pedal a big wheel up the street safely, or The Specials could record a video about how little is happening.

The inside of Sanders HQ is cheerful in that way that insurgent campaigns have to be. Two young people jabber about the virtual monopoly of corporate radio. Another extols the virtues of untainted Little Rock tap water. A wall has been converted to a hand-painted mural-sized Bernie sign, while posters unique to this Sanders outpost show the candidate standing in front of a blue-and-red sunburst with a fist up in a kind of Bernie Power salute.

The Sanders campaign is up against a lot, especially in a contest with a candidate whose home state advantage makes any attempt at a win seem outright futile. Neither campaign wants to waste money on what amounts to a contest to see how many delegates Sanders can peel away. Nobody seems to even want to bother polling, with FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics listing only two major polls, the most recent nearly two weeks old and showing a 25-point Clinton lead.



“It can be really intimidating, just how much media support is behind Hillary and the clout behind her name,” says Brittany Beckett-Harrison, a 24-year-old Missourian studying information sciences at UALR, running a worker-owned tech cooperative in the time not devoured by the Sanders campaign, and trying to create “a sustainable micro village of tiny homes for activists and artists” to push back against Little Rock’s wave of gentrification.

People tend to really like Clinton, like the brand she represents. Or they feel like they’ve gotta stick to party lines Brittany Beckett-Harrison, student

“It’s quite honestly almost impossible to convert Clinton supporters,” she says.

While Cuffman hears a lot of Democratic voters default to the “trope [of] she’s the one who can get stuff done”, Beckett-Harrison sounds a more resigned note.

“It’s more that she’s just inevitable. One, people tend to really like Clinton, like the brand she represents. Or they feel like they’ve gotta stick to party lines.”

In addition to the fact that nobody in Arkansas has had a chance to have their own Bernie stories, the Sanders campaign faces demographic obstacles. Sanders has criticized both Clintons’ support for the 1996 crime bill and private prisons – which created a profitable pipeline of warm bodies that disproportionately included people of color – as well as welfare reform that allowed conservative states to establish welfare application requirements so protracted that many applicants abandoned the process out of necessity.

But what works in national rhetoric is different on the ground. Both Cuffman and Beckett-Harrison are white. He has light chin-length brown hair and what might forever now be Rick Perry glasses; she has blue eyes and a cursive tattoo on the inside of a forearm. Both wear black Sanders shirts, and both could be unfairly pegged as kids day tripping from the college to tell the black community that they have been misserved by the Clintons and would fare better with a Jewish guy from Vermont.

“You definitely don’t want to talk to a black person about Bernie and say, ‘Well you should support Bernie because 50 years ago he was marching for you,’ Cuffman says. “That’s paternalistic and condescending. I’d rather know what that person cares about and talk to them about that.”

“Anti-racism is something I hold dear,” says Beckett-Harrison, “and some Bernie supporters are inclined to say, ‘Why aren’t black people turning out for Bernie?’ And, well, how many of us throughout the years have been actively fighting for black issues?”

Instead, she prefers to respond to individual prospective-voter concerns and otherwise emulate the candidate. “What he’s trying to do is let people come to their own opinions as opposed to trying to tokenize the black vote.”

More importantly, it’s hard to see an aggressively racially oriented canvassing tactic working here.

A retired attorney who has worked on state and local campaigns and has known Hillary Clinton since the 1970s, who spoke on condition of anonymity, thinks it’s a non-starter.

“I just don’t think the crime or welfare bills play. You have to remember that many black leaders supported both. Most of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the crime bill.”

And the home-state advantage isn’t a shallow one.

“Those roots go back, especially in Arkansas. The number of black churches that governors like Clinton and Dale Bumpers – especially Clinton – went to Sunday services at is legendary. Who got appointed to state university boards? How many state positions did Rodney Slater have? His judicial appointments and enforcement of voting rights alone are a difference of night and day between him and Republicans.”

‘No seats? We’ve been standing for two hours’

Those roots extend to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a traditionally black university where Clinton holds a Sunday evening rally in the lobby outside the HO Clemmons Arena, a few blocks away from empty businesses stripped down to the cinder blocks, ramshackle buildings peeling paint, homes with no Love It Or List It future slouching atop their foundations like they passed out leaning on them.

“No seats? We’ve been standing for two hours, and we’ve gotta stand again?” an older black bald gentlemen with glasses and faint white whiskers complains before walking over to lean against a riser and wait for Clinton. The white people in the room are few, and of those present the ratio of law enforcement, journalists and TV crew to attendees is probably 5:1. People stand beneath the stage, on every step of a staircase rising above it, and on a second story, on another set of risers, peering down.

There are multigenerational groups, whole families, a few in which mom is taking her child to see Clinton speak just as her mom did with her. The reasons are just as you expect: because the Clintons have been good for the community, because the Republicans must not win.

Clinton sounds hoarse, perhaps still fighting remnants of a cold from before the New Hampshire primary. Her speech is by now long familiar to anyone with a C-SPAN problem. Still, she tailors a few moments.

“I’m proud of Arkansas, and I go round braggin’ on this state,” she says, after praising the state legislature and Republican governor Asa Hutchinson’s efforts to expand medical coverage. She digs in on “my opponent” when promoting her debt-free college plan above the ominous “no such things as a free lunch” of the Sanders free college plan. Later, she adds, “I am not a single-issue candidate because we are not a single-issue country.” Sanders isn’t either, but this is the recent critique.

At the end, Clinton says, “I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep … I don’t think in a campaign you make wild promises, you insult everybody.”

She’s talking about Trump, but there’s enough of a pause before the “insult” bit that allows one to think she’s talking about Sanders too.

Even if Clinton’s speech is by-the-numbers, the audience makes it more intimate. There is no attempt at call-and-response, no precious bits of pulpit melting-pot schtick like in 2008, although someone shouts “YES HE DID!” after Clinton says that Obama did a great job pulling America back from the brink of depression.

She does herself an injustice on television. She does not come across as warmly as she is capable of coming across Jim Guy Tucker, former Arkansas governor

Instead, one can see a more palpable sense of connection that Clinton supporters insist has always been there – sometimes to the point of seeming to protest too much – and that the camera cannot capture.

“She does herself an injustice on television,” Jim Guy Tucker says. “She does not come across as warmly as she is capable of coming across. I have seen her be plenty warm plenty of times, but that’s not a strong suit, and I think that hurts her a lot. I’ve seen more people win races because they were ‘nice guys’ than over policy.”

Wilma Donley, a 61-year-old black woman from Little Rock, says she came to the rally specifically to see that side of Clinton. For her, welfare reform and the crime bill are just exigencies of now-antiquated politics.

“Whatever it was back then,” she says, “we’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t done. It could be the politics of the time. But I know she is really sincere and passionate. I have watched her mean what she says. Seen her actually care and have the consideration, especially with the children.”

Donley has a Clinton story too, though she doesn’t think to mention it until pressed.

“Oh, well, I used to answer phones in the governor’s office. What’s it called? Where people would call in, they had a number to complain.”

Perhaps the most striking statement of the rally came not from anything said by Clinton but by the room itself. Standing in a lobby, just beyond a set of doors leading to an arena that could seat 20 times the number of attendees comfortably, the political rules of packing people in a smaller room only emphasized how many people weren’t there. And while that’s not a feature for the Clinton campaign, it’s a significant bug for Sanders’.

With Clinton perceived as a foregone conclusion and no other races on the ballot to induce people to show up to the polls, potential voters might not be defecting to Sanders because they’re just not voting, period.

“I don’t know of a contested race for a House seat or a Senate seat in the state,” the retired attorney tells me. “There are hotly contested races for Arkansas supreme court with lots of out-of-state dark money, but probably 40% of voters are unaware of the race. And it will not get them to the polls. So Sanders has an uphill job to even get turnout.”

When the rally disperses, everyone finds a card for one of those races tucked into the driver’s window of their cars. It features an endorsement of Clark Mason from the former judge, Reverend Marion Humphrey, a man I know from four years ago out of the pure dumb bad luck of having a dead stepfather-in-law in a town I might see for three days per year.

He is, despite a fraught history with the Clintons, a microcosm of their give-and-take with the black community, endorsing Hillary Clinton too. And in a state where all the dots are seemingly only a few feet apart, he is, almost certainly, someone Bernie Sanders doesn’t know.