Legendary Democratic veteran strategist James Carville told the Politicon podcast that everyone is sleeping on a Senate race that no one saw as possibly a candidate to be competitive.
All across the country, Republicans are scrambling as the Senate map shifts against them, pulling money out of states like North Carolina where polls show them all but hopelessly behind, and shoring up incumbents in red states where Democrats are putting up a surprising fight, like Kansas.
But one of those red states that no one seems to be paying attention to, Carville said, is Arkansas — where Democratic farmer Hallie Shoffner is mounting a bid against Sen. Tom Cotton.
"I had the Democrat up three," said Carville. "I called her and she said, 'Oh, no, uh-uh Mr. Carville, our polling has us even.' Okay. Even, up three, it's all control. You don't even know they have a race. If you watched TV and you read the news and you did everything, you would be unaware that there's a race for the United States Senate. The incumbent is Tom Cotton, who is not a minor figure in the Republican Party, and is in deep trouble for his re-election. Deep trouble."
It's not getting reported, Carville argued, because "Your trusted news sources — the one thing you can always trust your trusted news sources to do is to exaggerate Democratic political vulnerability and exaggerate Republican political power."
Cotton has held office since 2015, being swept into power in the 2014 Republican wave election, and Arkansas has not seen a serious Senate contest since then.