On August 14, the Arkansas Times ran a piece asking a question that would have sounded ridiculous two years ago: could a Libertarian nobody had heard of have the best shot at beating our governor?

The Libertarian is Colt Shelby, a sixth-generation Franklin County man who works in oil and gas and says he "was not political at all" before 2024. He isn't in this race because he wanted to be a politician. He's in it because Sarah Sanders tried to build a 3,000-bed prison on a road near his house without telling anybody first.

That's the part worth sitting with. Sanders didn't get a challenger from the left. She got one from a rural county where more than three in four voters had picked her for governor two years earlier. And before Shelby ever filed to run, those same voters and their legislators had already beaten her — five times in her own Republican Senate. Then she tried to make them pay for it, and lost that fight too.

Here's how a governor with a Republican supermajority ends up losing to Republicans.

A prison nobody was told about

On Halloween 2024, Sanders announced that the state had already bought 815 acres north of Charleston in Franklin County. The land cost $2.9 million, and it was going to hold the largest prison in Arkansas history.

Nobody in Franklin County was asked. Not the county officials, not the utilities, not the people who live there. They found out when the rest of us did. And when public records requests later pried the emails loose, they showed state officials had intentionally hidden the purchase — and were passing around South Park clips to mock the residents who were upset about it.

A week after the announcement, more than 1,800 people packed the Charleston High School gym to tell the state no. That is an enormous turnout for a rural county. It did not change her mind.

Then there was the price. The first number Sanders gave the public was $470 million. Emails obtained through a records request showed that an architectural firm's initial estimate was $1.2 billion — more than two and a half times what she told us. By the time her allies went to the Legislature for money, the ask was $750 million, and adding the $75 million left over from Asa Hutchinson's administration put the estimated construction cost at $825 million, according to the California firm the state hired to run the project.

So: a secret purchase, a site the community rejected, and a cost that nearly doubled the moment anyone checked her math.

Her own Republican Senate said no. Five times.

Money bills in Arkansas need a three-fourths vote — 27 of the 35 state senators. Sanders' party holds far more seats than that. This should have been easy.

It wasn't. Senate Bill 354, the $750 million prison appropriation, was voted down over and over during the 2025 session. On the fifth and final try, it got 21 yes votes — still six short — with nine senators voting no and five more voting "present," which does the same job as a no. Seven of the nine no votes were Republicans.

Their objections weren't left-wing. Sen. Bryan King (R-Green Forest) called the project "fiscally irresponsible" and said the "only winners" would be the contractors hired to plan and build it. He pointed at Utah, which built a mega-prison, blew the budget, and then couldn't staff it. His alternative was to fund mental health treatment, help county jails, and add beds to prisons Arkansas already owns.

That is a conservative argument about wasting money, made by conservatives, and Sanders could not answer it. She didn't even try again during the 2026 fiscal session.

Then she went after the Republicans who stopped her

This is where it stops being a budget dispute and becomes a story about how our governor uses her office.

Sanders' response to losing a policy fight was to try to remove the legislators who beat her. In the March 3, 2026 primaries, she went after three Republican seats. She lost all three.

Sen. Ron Caldwell (R-Wynne) voted against the prison money all five times. Sanders hand-picked a challenger for him: Trey "BoDirt" Bohannan, a Stuttgart businessman with no political experience whom she described as "somebody I have known for a long time" and had handed a Small Business of the Month award in 2024.

Her candidate had a problem. His campaign told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette he'd lived in the district "for almost three years," but he had changed his voter registration into the district on October 21, 2025 — exactly one week before announcing his campaign. His own divorce filings put him in Jefferson County, outside the district, into November 2024. And for a candidate who called himself a huge Trump supporter, state records show he didn't vote at all in 2024. He got a late endorsement from Kid Rock. Caldwell beat him with about 70% of the vote.

Sen. Bryan King (R-Green Forest), the prison's loudest critic in the Legislature, drew a Sanders-backed challenger too — Bobby Ballinger Jr., son of the former senator King had already beaten in 2022. King took 60% and sent another Ballinger home.

Sen. Blake Johnson (R-Corning) had Sanders on his side and had held his seat since 2015. Rep. Jeremy Wooldridge beat him with over 62%, winning three of the district's four counties.

Three races. Three losses. In Republican primaries, in deep-red districts, against a sitting Republican governor's full public support.

She still won't say the site was wrong

Two years and $2.9 million later, the land sits there. In April 2026, the Department of Corrections said flatly that "the project has been on hold for several months now with no new developments" and that "no work has been done outside of routine maintenance and upkeep." Sanders didn't ask for prison construction money in her budget for the coming year. She asked instead to spend the leftover $75 million on adding bed space to relieve county jails and on recidivism programs — much closer to what Bryan King had been proposing than to what she'd spent two years fighting for.

But she has not admitted she was wrong about the site. Asked about it, she said:

"I still firmly believe that we have to expand capacity and I've yet to see a better alternative than the Franklin County location."

Adam Watson, one of the Franklin County residents who organized against the prison, had a short answer to that: "I think if the governor is saying she hasn't heard any better ideas, then that just means she is not listening." Asked what would finally convince him the project was dead, he said it would take "When the ink is dry on a deed" handing those 815 acres to someone other than the state.

That's what our governor has earned in Franklin County. Not disagreement — distrust. They don't believe she'll stop.

Two years spent on this

Remember what all of this was supposed to be about. Sanders sold the prison as being tough on crime.

Arkansas already locks up its people at one of the highest rates in the country. We're still one of the least safe states in America — CNBC's 2026 rankings gave Arkansas a D– and put us near the bottom for crime anyway. Building the biggest prison in state history on land that turned out to be a poor fit geologically and hydrologically was never going to fix that. Bryan King said so out loud, to his own party, and got a primary challenger for his trouble.

Meanwhile the things that actually determine whether Arkansans are safe, fed, and healthy haven't moved. We're still dead last in the country for food insecurity. We're still 49th of 50 for overall health. She has been governor since 2023.

The money doesn't scare them anymore

Which brings us back to Shelby, and to the reason a Libertarian with no money is suddenly worth writing about.

Sanders has raised $7.7 million and had more than $5 million in the bank as of the end of June. Shelby has raised just under $25,000. That is not a close race on paper, and Sanders is still the clear favorite in November.

Shelby's argument is that in Arkansas in 2026, the governor's backing has become a liability:

"Money does matter, but it doesn't always matter... All these guys were outspent and outgunned, and they all won because their opponents were endorsed by the governor."

He isn't making that up. That's exactly what happened to Bohannan, to Ballinger, and to Johnson. And Sanders keeps making it easier — she skipped the one debate her challengers showed up for in June, leaving an empty chair on the stage while they spent an hour on her record.

Shelby's own summary is the sharpest thing anybody has said about the governor's standing with her own party this year:

"The worst thing that could happen to my campaign at this point would be if the governor endorsed me."

A governor whose endorsement is a punchline in her own primaries isn't strong. She's just well-funded. Franklin County figured that out first. We deserve better.

Source

Colt Following: Could Libertarian candidate Colt Shelby have the best shot against Gov. Sarah Sanders? — Matt Campbell, Arkansas Times, August 14, 2026. Photo: Colt Shelby for Governor, via Arkansas Times.