Despite lacking a primary challenge, Cotton has refused to moderate his views. Cotton to voters: I'm no Grinch

EL DORADO, Ark. — Democrats are trying to turn the critical Senate race here into a personality contest, and Republican Tom Cotton knows he’s got a serious problem if they succeed.

The 37-year-old freshman congressman is the prized GOP Senate recruit of the election year — boasting a résumé with a pair of Harvard degrees and stints fighting in two wars — but on the stump, he’s been parodied for exuding all the emotion of a drill sergeant. A barrage of Democratic TV ads depicting him as a heartless ideologue who votes against farmers and seniors hasn’t helped.


In top battleground Senate races across the nation, Democrats believe their best shot is to frame the contests as a discrete choice between two people — as opposed to a national referendum on President Barack Obama — then make the Republican as repugnant as possible. Cotton’s response: an all-out charm offensive. He’s hosted a country music concert with Jo Dee Messina, invited a POLITICO reporter on a 5-mile run through the onetime oil boom town of El Dorado, given TV news crews tours of his family’s cattle farm and blanketed the airwaves with ads highlighting his softer side.

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“I’m warm, dammit,” Cotton joked during an interview over breakfast here, when asked whether his efforts are meant to bolster his personal appeal.

For much of the year, Cotton’s opponent, Sen. Mark Pryor, has been seen in many quarters as a dead man walking — a southern Democrat in a state lurching right facing reelection in a year tilted the GOP’s way. But lately polls suggest the race is more like a tossup.

So Cotton’s mandate is clear: Convince voters he’s likable enough so he can fight the campaign on his own terms. Heightening the challenge is the fact that Pryor and his popular father are both natural, back slapping pols, with a combined half-century of practice at retail politics.

“My entire campaign is not just an effort to show warmth, it’s an effort for people to get a sense of me and know who I am — not just know how I vote,” Cotton said. “They can look at the House roll call and figure that out.”

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And Democrats have. Since winning his first term in 2012 to represent a vast district that stretches from the southern border with Louisiana to northwest Arkansas near Fayetteville, Cotton has consistently been one of the chamber’s most conservative members — even in his own all-GOP House delegation. He has been the lone “no” vote in his delegation on an array of issues, including the farm bill, the Violence Against Women Act and disaster aid — giving Democrats plenty of ammunition to portray him as a right-wing zealot in their multimillion-dollar ad campaign against him.

Despite lacking a primary challenge, Cotton has refused to moderate his views, which has privately perplexed even some Republicans, given how central this race is to the battle for the Senate. The congressman is gambling that a GOP surge has moved Arkansas closer on the ideological spectrum to Texas or Oklahoma than the state that propelled Bill Clinton to the White House and currently has a Democratic governor and senior senator.

The fact that Cotton has yet to pull away in a political climate that strongly favors the GOP also underscores a larger dynamic this election season: Defeating a well-funded Democratic incumbent is not a given with attack ads flooding the airwaves.

Cotton is now in the midst of a concerted strategy to gain momentum in what has largely been a back-and-forth race. To many Republicans, his push couldn’t come soon enough.

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“Tom is a very structured person — and that’s to his credit and that’s one of the attributes that a lot of people like about him,” said Rep. Steve Womack, a Republican who represents a district in Northwest Arkansas. “But as I kind of look around, I sense that there will be a lot of discussions about the differences between appealing to your base and appealing to a broader constituency that is going to be counted in November.”

The lean 6-foot-5 Cotton is quick-witted and polite and has an obvious command of complex policy issues. Yet he lacks the gregarious personality of a Clinton or a Sen. Lindsey Graham, and his straight-laced nature comes across at times.

At the country music concert with Messina, “Cotton for Senate” signs littered the outdoor venue, with hundreds of voters in a festive mood on a muggy night, sitting on folding chairs and spilling onto the streets outside the local watering hole called Rascals. After shaking hands and stopping for a quick TV interview, Cotton took the stage to introduce Messina but didn’t exactly rev up the crowd. He said virtually nothing about himself, asked attendees not to record the concert — and let Messina do the performing.

“El Dorado, please put your hands together for Jo Dee Messina!” was about the extent of Cotton’s introduction.

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When Cotton does loosen up — it’s more apt to happen in one-on-one encounters, once he has a chance to engage — he tries to project a down-to-earth image. He smiles — a lot. Sometimes he’ll stop to chitchat for longer than a few moments, but often he doesn’t, moving methodically through crowds like a businessman on a mission.

At a packed barbecue joint in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a lunch-time crowd was huddled in their booths eating ribs, pulled pork and chicken. Cotton moved from table to table, shaking hands and taking pictures and holding up a baby. He made light of a signed picture of Pryor hanging on the wall.

“Want to take a picture next to this guy?” he jokingly asked a supporter.

Cotton hopes if voters have a better sense of him, they’ll be less prone to believe the Democratic attacks. No one can accuse him of election-year pandering, Cotton says, adding that he believes voters will ultimately reward his principled stands.

“Look, the easy vote would be to vote for the farm bill,” he said when asked about the political cost of opposing the popular measure in a rural state. “It’s called the farm bill for goodness sake!”

Running in a reddening state

The trends here in the Razorback State certainly favor the GOP. For the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans control the full Legislature — a rapid shift since 2008 when they were deeply in the minority. Six years ago, just one Republican served in the six-person congressional delegation — now Pryor is the only Democrat. In 2012, Obama was trounced by Mitt Romney, losing by nearly 24 points here. Democrats are trying to hold the governor’s office this year, but Republicans are favored to win that race, too.

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Cotton says his father is emblematic of the shift in the state: a conservative man who never voted in a Republican primary until two years ago but is now voting GOP.

“Part of the problem is that Mark Pryor is not working for you; he’s working for Barack Obama,” Cotton said at an El Dorado fundraiser, as donors who paid up to $1,000 to attend noshed on cornbread, fried green beans and catfish.

Democrats are equally upbeat about Pryor’s chances. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has reserved $3 million in TV airtime in the cheap media markets here from July through Election Day, with a Harry Reid-aligned super PAC reserving nearly $2 million itself, according to sources tracking the buys. Far more money is expected to pour in on both sides.

Pryor, who is seeking a third term and faced no GOP opponent in 2008, said he hasn’t been “shy” pointing out Cotton’s “irresponsible” votes that show the Republican putting his “political interests ahead of what’s best for Arkansas.”

The 51-year-old Pryor, who won his first term when he was 39, is trying to sell himself as a pragmatic-minded senator in the mold of the centrist Democrats like Clinton who long ruled the state. Pryor is benefiting from lingering goodwill from his father, David, a former three-term senator and ex-governor, and even his late grandfather, Edgar, a county sheriff in Southern Arkansas.

Pryor has faced his own deluge of scathing attacks from conservative outside groups linking him to Obama. Already some $13 million has been spent across the airwaves from both sides, according to media tracking sources.

“It feels like October when you turn on the TV,” the senator said.

Republicans are intent on turning the race into a referendum on Obama, relentlessly tying Pryor to the White House. When asked whether he approved of the president’s job performance, Pryor wouldn’t say.

“There are a lot of things about the president that I don’t approve of — in terms of his policies,” Pryor said, adding he’s worked with presidents of both parties.

Similarly, asked in a follow-up email if he would vote for Obamacare again if he had the chance, Pryor didn’t answer directly. He said the law “isn’t perfect” and he’d “work to make it better,” but “something needed to be done” to rein in the insurance industry.

‘Turning into the fire’

A model senator in Cotton’s eyes is Tom Coburn: a straight-shooting, staunchly conservative Oklahoman known to spar with both parties and who has earned the nickname “Dr. No.” Still, even Coburn flirted with compromise in the Senate, including expressing openness to increased tax revenues as part of a “grand bargain” to rein in the deficit.

It’s not clear where Cotton would bend.

Cotton defends his conservative stands even as he acknowledges the difficulty of defending them on the campaign trail.

“One of the first things that [my] drill sergeant taught me in basic training,” he said during the interview, “was that the basic lesson in the Army is you do the hard right over the easy wrong.” Spurred by the 9/11 attacks, Cotton joined the Army in 2005 as an infantry officer, later deploying to Iraq at the height of the violence there — before volunteering for a second tour of combat duty in Afghanistan in 2008.

The easy wrong, according to Cotton, includes the farm bill, which he derides as the “food stamp bill” for its provisions bolstering the welfare program. It is simply a “bad deal for Arkansas farmers,” Cotton said. However, Arkansas’ other senator, Republican John Boozman, has called the bill “a really good product.”

Cotton was the lone member of the Arkansas congressional delegation to back the fiercely conservative Republican Study Committee budget — a plan even more stringent than the budget plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan that Democrats claim would “end Medicare as we know it.” The plan would rapidly transform the seniors’ health care program into one giving taxpayers more private control, which Cotton says is needed to preserve its long-term viability.

When Cotton was asked whether he believed Social Security should be privatized, he responded, “I wouldn’t say that,” before advocating for gradually raising the retirement age to 70. But in response to a follow-up question about whether taxpayers should be allowed to have personalized — or privatized — Social Security accounts, Cotton said “everything needs to be on the table” to “modernize” the program and ensure it’s “available for the next generation.”

On his votes against two versions of the Violence Against Women Act, Cotton argued the bill unfairly limited due process rights on Native American reservations and did little to prevent human trafficking.

Cotton was also the lone member of the state’s congressional delegation to oppose a compromise to slash student interest rates — even though he took federal Stafford loans during his time at Harvard.

“I support the student loan program; what I don’t support are politicians and bureaucrats dictating down to the decimal point the interest rates on student loans,” Cotton said. “It’s making [education] more expensive.”

Last fall, Cotton backed the tea party-inspired tactic that helped prompt a government shutdown — tying spending legislation to a provision defunding Obamacare — an episode widely seen as a political debacle for the GOP. But Cotton blamed Senate Democrats for causing the shutdown and suggested he would not do anything differently: “I would still try to fight Obamacare.”

If his voting record seems like a hand-wrapped gift to Democratic opposition researchers, Cotton sounded unperturbed.

“At the infantry school, you are taught how to react to an ambush, which you don’t have time to plan for, you are just ambushed,” he said. “And the only way to react to an ambush is to turn into the fire and fight through it.”