On Tuesday, voters across America handed Democrats control of the U.S. House and Senate, with wins in red states like Texas, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina.

Arkansas didn't flip. Every Republican on this site who was on the ballot here won, or is leading. But look closer and the picture changes. Republicans lost seats they've held for years. Their winners won by less. And the closest race in the state may have been decided by a map they drew five years ago.

Here's the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: the supermajority is gone

For ten years, Republicans held so many seats in the Arkansas House that they didn't need a single Democrat to pass a budget. That ended Tuesday night.

Going in, Republicans held 79 of the 100 seats. It takes 75 votes to pass most budget bills in the state House. Democrats flipped at least 10 seats, according to the Arkansas Advocate — the party's biggest gain since Republicans took their supermajority in 2016. Now Republicans will need some Democratic votes to fund the government.

"We need to be a check on bad policies," House Minority Leader Andrew Collins told the Advocate. "We have a little bit more leverage to do that now."

The first big test is health care. Arkansas's Medicaid expansion, which covers more than 200,000 people, loses its federal approval at the end of this year under the Trump budget bill Sarah Sanders cheered, and the Legislature comes back in January to decide what replaces it. The state's top Republican senator has said he doesn't think lawmakers will support keeping the expansion at all. Spending bills like that one need a three-fourths vote in the House, so now Democrats get a say.

Some of the wins came in places Democrats haven't won in a long time:

• Northwest Arkansas. Democrats flipped five House seats in Benton and Washington counties. In District 19, Democrat Jamie Atkinson beat Republican Rep. Steve Unger 5,092 to 4,029. In District 13, Mitchell Smith beat Rep. Scott Richardson 4,446 to 3,641.
• Jonesboro. Teacher Erika Askeland beat six-term Republican Rep. Jack Ladyman, 3,537 to 3,435. She ran on public schools and fighting hunger. It was the only seat to flip in a region with no sitting Democratic lawmakers.
• The state Senate. Social worker Allison Grigsby Sweatman beat Republican Rep. Brandon Achor in north Pulaski County, 18,101 to 16,039. Achor was a co-sponsor of the LEARNS Act, the law that created Arkansas's school voucher program. Sweatman ran against those vouchers. She lost this same seat in 2022 and ran again.
• County government. Democrats won an 8–7 majority on the Washington County Quorum Court, and flipped four seats on Benton County's, which had been all-Republican. Democrat Wendell Griffen won the race to lead Pulaski County, the state's biggest, and will be the first Black person elected to that job.

Voters also turned down a Republican-backed cut to Saline County's library tax. If it had passed, the libraries were expected to lose $1.4 million a year, about a fourth of their budget. That county's library director was fired three years ago in a fight with conservatives over LGBTQ+ books.

The bad: they won, by less

Sarah Sanders won a second term as governor with nearly 54% of the vote, according to the secretary of state. Four years ago she won with 62.9%. Her opponent then was the same Chris Jones who is now running against French Hill.

She lost ground to two men who between them had a fraction of her money. Democrat Fred Love got about 38.5%, according to the Arkansas Times. Libertarian Colt Shelby got more than 7.5%. Shelby isn't a career politician. He's a Franklin County oil-and-gas worker who got into the race because Sanders tried to build a giant prison near his land. Before he ever filed, Republicans in her own state Senate voted it down five times, and when she tried to punish them in the primaries, she went 0 for 3.

Shelby's concession was not a warm one. "You have been given another opportunity after losing a great deal of faith from the people," he wrote to her.

His 7.5% also means the Libertarian Party gets a guaranteed spot on the 2028 ballot. In Arkansas, a party only needs 3% for governor to keep its place.

Tom Cotton won a third term in the Senate, with about 54% to Democrat Hallie Shoffner's 42.5%, according to Talk Business & Politics. Shoffner is a farmer whose family's farm closed. She ran on how tariffs and fuel prices are hurting Arkansas farmers. An August poll had her slightly ahead.

Cotton and his allies outspent her by a lot, according to the Advocate, with ads calling her soft on immigration. Some of the money came from places you wouldn't expect: a super PAC with "Arkansans" in its name that hasn't taken a dime from any Arkansan and is registered in Alabama. And Republicans ran anti-trans ads for Sanders, Cotton and Hill, about care Arkansas already bans for minors.

One voter, a registered Republican and nursing student named Jared Saeler, told the Advocate he voted for Shoffner because Cotton's ads took her words "way out of context." He voted for Trump in 2024. His verdict on Trump's second term: "Terrible." And why: "Just look at our economy. Look at gas. Look at Iran."

The three other House Republicans all won:

• Rick Crawford won a ninth term in east Arkansas with about 65%. He has voted against every House resolution to end the Iran war that's driving up diesel prices for the farmers in his district.
• Bruce Westerman won a seventh term in south and west Arkansas with about 65%. He campaigned on Trump's budget bill, saying it will help with affordability. That's the same bill that blocks the fix that would let food stamps keep up with the price of a meal, in the state the USDA ranks the most food-insecure in the country.
• Steve Womack won a ninth term in northwest Arkansas with about 55% to Democrat Robb Ryerse's 41.5%. That's a district Republicans have held since 1967 — and the same region where Democrats just flipped five state House seats.

The ugly: French Hill and the map

The tightest race in Arkansas was in the 2nd District, around Little Rock.

With about 99% of the vote counted, French Hill led Democrat Chris Jones by 4,402 votes — 127,427 to 123,025, or 50.9% to 49.1% — according to Associated Press results reported by Talk Business & Politics. As of Wednesday, the AP and CNN still hadn't called it. The Advocate called it Hill's toughest reelection race yet.

Hill is lucky the race was run on the map it was.

How the map was drawn

Until 2021, all of Pulaski County — Little Rock and the towns around it — was in the 2nd District. Then the Republican legislature redrew the lines. It cut a mostly Black part of Pulaski County out of the 2nd District and put mostly white Cleburne County in instead. Pulaski County is now split among three districts.

Even the Republican governor at the time, Asa Hutchinson, wouldn't sign it. He said he was worried about what it would do to minority voters. But he didn't veto it either, so it became law.

Opponents went to court. In June 2025, a panel of three federal judges threw out the last remaining case. They ruled the voters hadn't proved that race was the main reason for the lines. Their reasoning matters, though. The judges said the voters' alternative maps didn't meet the legislature's political goals. They said goals like "partisanship" could explain the result.

So the court never ruled the map was fair. It ruled the voters hadn't proved it was about race, and it treated the legislature's political goals as a legitimate reason for drawing it.

What the map was worth on Tuesday

Max Brantley, the longtime editor of the Arkansas Times, ran the numbers on Facebook on election night. His count had Hill ahead by 4,442 votes. Of that, he wrote, 5,898 votes came from Cleburne County alone — the county swapped in for the Black neighborhoods taken out of Pulaski.

That's more than Hill's whole lead.

Brantley added up the rest: the Democratic votes from Pulaski that were moved into the 1st and 4th districts. All told, he estimated the 2021 map was worth "nearly 12,000 votes" to Hill. "Without them, Jones would have had a comfortable margin," he wrote. The Arkansas Times' own reporter said the same thing more carefully: all signs point to Hill benefitting from the gerrymander.

Hill lives in Little Rock. According to Brantley, he lost his home county, Pulaski, by 47,000 votes. He also lost his own precinct, near the Country Club of Little Rock, 573 to 373.

Hill hasn't made himself easy to reach at home, either. Protesters have stood outside his Little Rock office every Thursday since February 2025 asking for an in-person town hall, and as of August he was still holding them only by telephone. He's a former bank CEO who chairs the House banking committee, and he wrote the measure that killed a $5 cap on overdraft fees.

The rest of the ugly

A few more results from Tuesday:

• The man who threw out more than 95,000 signatures got a new job. Secretary of State Cole Jester, Sarah Sanders' former lawyer, counted zero of the signatures on a petition to protect Arkansans' right to put measures on the ballot. He was elected land commissioner Tuesday with no Democrat running against him. His replacement as the state's top election official is Republican state Sen. Kim Hammer, who sponsored several laws restricting that same petition process.
• A lawmaker charged with domestic violence was elected county judge. Former Republican Rep. Austin McCollum quit the state House in August after he was arrested on domestic violence charges. He was elected Benton County judge Tuesday, unopposed. Arkansas law gave his party no way to take his name off the ballot.
• A fix for a problem that doesn't exist. Voters passed Issue 1, which bans noncitizens from voting in state and local elections. Arkansas's constitution already requires voters to be citizens, and no Arkansas town lets noncitizens vote.

What the results show

Arkansas Democrats broke a 10-year Republican supermajority in the state House by flipping at least 10 seats, so Republicans can no longer pass most budget bills on their own. Sarah Sanders and Tom Cotton both won with about 54%, and Sanders' share fell from 62.9% four years ago. French Hill leads Chris Jones by 4,402 votes in a district Republicans redrew in 2021, when they swapped Black neighborhoods in Pulaski County for Cleburne County — a county that, by the Arkansas Times' count, gave Hill a 5,898-vote lead on its own.

Source

Live coverage: Arkansas 2026 election — Arkansas Advocate staff, November 4, 2026.