It's hillbilly country. It's like West Virginia politically. I'd avoid ambiguous terms like "conservative" (and for that matter "liberal") in such a discussion as this. I'd describe it as traditionalistic, to use Jacob Elazar's Political Culture model, and in that sense it is much like the rest of the South. But like WV, Arkansas doesn't consist of a few rich guys and lots of poor guys. It's pretty much all poor guys. Planters never did put tobacco and such way up in the hills, but rather stayed in the rich soils of the coastal plains, so fabulously rich planters never added to the Southern quality of WV and AR the way they did in, say, Virginia or the Carolinas. And "chicken in every pot" and the rest of the New Deal and Johnson's Great Society resonate very well with poor hillbillies. It's the same way in England. Lowland people look a bit down on hillfolk. Think of all the jokes about Scots having sex with their sheep. Same way here. We have Virginia and the Carolinas populated by wealthy English gentleman planters, and the McCoys and Hatfields and other various Scots and Welsh groups moving into WV (and eventually, after the French and Indian Wars, to AR). So those places are like Little Scotland whereas the rest of the South is, well, I was about to say little England, but it's more like half little England and half little Ghana, owing to the slave trade of the 16th through 19th centuries. So basically, it's traditionalistic like the rest of the south, but the lack of the very rich (white) planters, and the lack of the very very poor descendants of the slaves gives it a much more homogenous feel. And the lack of any fabulously wealthy folks also make leftist politics resonate better there as well. Socialism sells pretty well when you don't have a pot to piss in. This doesn't come from a basic lack of conservative values, but rather a basic lack of economic resources.
