He would not have been able to beat Tom Cotton so he should only have run if he was going to avoid McGrath-esque grifting and had no further political ambitions. If he wants a job, he should run for a row office (he's term limited from seeking the governorship again) or Congress.
Tbh I think he’d have had a much better shot at actually winning than McGrath. Mike Beebe is actually popular in his state, where he has actually won, and big, even in a Republican wave year. A campaign (accurately) painting Cotton as a dangerous radical and Beebe as a sensible Blue Dog might have hd a shot. Still likely would have been the underdog, but would be more comparable to the position Harrison is in than McGrath.
No. Graham has much more of a base problem than Tom Cotton (or Mitch McConnell, for the matter) and the base is all that's needed for a Republican in a federal, statewide race in Arkansas. He might end up with a better margin than McGrath but the state was fundamentally unwinnable whereas SCSEN and KYSEN were plausible reaches with the right candidates.
Just look at what is happening to Doug Jones as an incumbent: Trump's 2016 margin in AL was only 1% better than his margin in AR in 2016. Their positions are likely to swap this year at the presidential level and Jones is getting blown out by Tuberville.
I mean, if even some random libertarian can pull it almost within 10, better than McGrath is polling, I don’t see why Beebe couldn’t have made this competitive. Beebe would be like Rocky Adkins or Steve Beshear running in Kentucky rather than McGrath.
This is an ARG poll (already to be taken with a grain of salt) and an internal; in addition, Libertarians potentially have access to crossover support that no Democrat could ever get (because of muh courts, among other issues).
At least one credible candidate ran statewide in 2018 in Arkansas for the Lands Commissioner's seat. All of them got blown out by 25+%. At least in KY, there is a Democratic coalition at the local level and the challenge is keeping enough of that together to survive federal contests; in AR, the path to winning a local race (let alone a federal one) appears to be much harder these days. The state party's infrastructure also appears to be a wreck: among other issues, they only got one candidate into the primary and this guy promptly withdrew at the first hint of opposition research. In winnable AR02, the current Democratic nominee filed only a day before the deadline and was also the only candidate to do so. This would all need to change very quickly for AR candidates to succeed and that's just not credible, so I'd rate this titanium R.
You’re going into details about state party organization, fundamentals, etc. Fair enough. But I highly doubt many voters gave a f—k about who the Land Commissioner was in 2018, probably just checked straight ticket R. Mike Beebe is a different story because he is a known brand in Arkansas who was highly popular, has been governor fairly recently, etc. He’d be about as strong a candidate as Democrats could field in Arkansas. In the South, when split-ticket voting still occurs, it’s generally because people know and like a particular candidate and don’t see him as “like the other Democrats.” Pretty sure this is about as true of Beebe as it is Beshear, Bel Edwards, Manchin, etc. Beebe is a moderate to conservative Dem who would likely come out in favor of Barrett’s nomination if he was running, so I don’t think the courts would necessarily be a huge deal. Also libertarians don’t exactly have conventional/evangelical Republican stances on the courts, and there’s no way you can convince me that a libertarian would do better than a Blue Dog Dem who was a popular former governor; lingering party loyalty among ancestral Dems alone is greater than any “crossover appeal” a libertarian could get.
At worst, I see this as highly similar to Phil Bredesen’s run in TN in 2018. He didn’t win, but it wasn’t a “Titanium R” race. And it was a very expensive one.
And the fact that a Democratic candidate for AR-02 could win despite it looking impossible at first, and polls have shown even the presidential race may be closer than expected (never mind the polls suggesting a national Democratic wave), suggests it wouldn’t be totally impossible for Beebe to keep it reasonably competitive. Worst case scenario? We force the GOP to spend money in Arkansas. I don’t see that as bad at all.
Kentucky’s long had the “federal statewide candidate” problem you describe too, by the way, especially against McConnell. He was vulnerable in 1996 and 2008, both years when KY was less R-leaning and in the former Bill Clinton won and McConnell’s opponent was in fact a younger Steve Beshear. He still won both years. So no, I’m not really convinced KY was substantially more winnable this year even with a strong candidate than AR with Beebe. Both would have been longshot reaches.
TL;DR: I don’t really think you have a great argument that Beebe shouldn’t have run, even if you’re correct that the race was unwinnable. You admit it may have been closer than McGrath’s race, which by itself means it’s more likely to force the GOP to spend there, which is better than nothing.
