At a party last month, a group in their 20s, many of them enrolled in the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, unveiled a new state and federal PAC. Called Naturally Blue, its aim is to maintain the tenuous majority of Democrats in the Arkansas legislature to promote an agenda of economic populism and to take the fight to the rest of Dixie. In a state where Democrats suffered heavy losses in 2010, the new PAC was well received, with the party reeling in about 300 guests, including a former Democratic governor, Jim Guy Tucker, and about $13,000. The founders believe that the economics of the South — namely its concentrated poverty — make the region “naturally blue.” Nate Looney, the PAC’s 25-year-old president, cites a report by the Southern Education Foundation in Atlanta showing that 42 percent of the nation’s most impoverished children live in the South. “Yet their parents show up and vote against their best interests,” Mr. Looney argues. His assessment notwithstanding, the South, of course, is mostly red. The legislatures of the old Confederacy are solidly Republican. All but two states — Arkansas and North Carolina — have Republican governors. And in Arkansas, Democratic control has slipped. Fueled by anger over the health care law, voters in 2010 added two Republicans to their House delegation and retained a third, leaving one Democrat. The Republicans also picked up one of the state’s two Senate seats in 2010. In the state legislature, Republicans gained 24 seats. Clint Reed, a former director of the Arkansas Republican Party and a public opinion consultant, said that in 2006 Democrats had a 13-point advantage over Republicans among voters in a generic Congressional race, according to his firm. Now, that number is reversed. In Arkansas, “you’ve had, in the Democratic Party all these years, larger-than-life political figures,” said Mr. Reed, citing not only Bill Clinton but also Dale Bumpers and David Pryor, who were popular governors and senators dating to the 1970s. “They’ve always been able to keep conservative white rural voters in their tent. That coalition really crumbled in 2010.” Now, Republican enthusiasm is so high that a record number have filed this year for state offices and have no need for an equivalent PAC, Mr. Reed said. “The Republican stuff is happening organically,” he said. The Republican surge of 2010 inspired Naturally Blue. That September, Mr. Looney and his best friend, Will Whiting, both Democrats and Razorbacks fans, watched their football team lose what now seems like a symbolic battle against the Crimson Tide of Alabama. Dejected, the two decided that night to get in the game, at least politically. They traveled around the country for months getting advice, meeting with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, studying redistricting maps and census data, and reaching out to Hispanic groups. The two brought in Marc Peters, 25, also of the Clinton School. Mr. Looney, the University of Arkansas student body president in 2009, is finishing a dual degree from the Clinton School and the University of Arkansas Bowen School of Law this May. Mr. Peters was the national student blog director for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. And Mr. Whiting held fund-raising posts at the University of Arkansas and Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Now he works for the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce and knows every deep pocket in the state. “This will be grass roots in a way that most PACs aren’t,” said Mr. Peters, referring to the “super PACs” powering this election cycle. “We’re interested in voter registration, going door to door, hosting town halls and taking on Republicans in areas where they assume they’re going to win.” Their first move is to tackle booming northwest Arkansas, a longtime Republican bastion that is home to Walmart and Tyson Foods. They are recruiting candidates and urging them to stand their ground on economic and social justice issues like the health care overhaul. (They are less eager to engage on “wedge issues” like abortion.) The PAC’s promotional literature encourages donations from across the country, noting that “for the cost of one 30-second spot in New York, we can run seven” in Arkansas, which they see as the best staging ground for taking back the South. Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, has seen this sort of PAC before. She says the odds are stacked against them. “A PAC like this,” she said, “is going to face a rather dark challenge if they don’t get a sugar daddy somewhere.” That has not happened yet. Mr. Whiting, the fund-raiser, said they first wanted a swell of support to prove their viability. To help get there, Naturally Blue recently held another party in an affluent Little Rock neighborhood to mark the state’s deadline to file for political office. Standing atop a chair at Browning’s Mexican Grill, Mr. Looney cheered the Democrats who had filed. He singled out Diana Gonzales Worthen, a Latina educator in northwest Arkansas running for the State Senate. Having studied the demographics — the district is 40 percent minority — Naturally Blue encouraged her to run. He introduced Ms. Gonzales Worthen, almost 20 years his senior, as an “up-and-coming star.” Waging an uphill fight, the newcomers still managed to catch the attention of the Democratic old guard. “I’m only here because my law school friend David Pryor” — the former governor — “called me and said I need to get over here,” said Herb Rule, who served in the state legislature in the late 1960s and is now running for Congress in the state’s Second District. “It’s a great idea,” he said of the PAC. “We’ll see if it works.”
