Saturday morning at the Love Building at 320 East Sixth Street, a Meet the Candidates event was hosted by the county’s Democratic Party, with speeches by those standing for Arkansas governor, U.S. Senate, U.S. Congress and Arkansas Supreme Court.
With the March 3rd party primary election looming, the candidates each worked to make clear the policies they would promote should they win office and distinguish themselves from their party opponents.
First, Fred Love, Democratic candidate for governor spoke. After him, a representative of Supha Xayprasith-Mays took the podium.
Then the attendees heard from the two candidates for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator, Hallie Shoffner and Ethan Dunbar; then those vying for nomination for Fourth District Congress, Steven O’Donnell and James Russell, III; then one nonpartisan candidate for Arkansas Supreme Court John Adams.
Gubernatorial candidates
State Senator Fred Love of Little Rock stood in front of the podium and occasionally walked around the front of the room. He began by providing the audience with a recounting of his childhood.
“At the age of four, I had a car accident which claimed some of my hearing. However, I was able to survive. By the time I was in fifth grade, my family faced homelessness, but thanks be to God, my grandparents provided us and me and my other three siblings with a safe place in their home,” Love said.
He explained the priorities he would follow should he win election as 1) economic development 2) education and 3) public health, also calling them “the key pillars of my campaign.” He said that while central Arkansas jobs were important, he knew of gaps in job creation in the state and intended to address those.
In education he said he intends to stop vouchers that remove funds from public schools for use in paying tuition at private schools in the state under the terms of the LEARNS Act. He also spoke to what he sees as an unmet need for Arkansas students.
“Our kids are suffering silently, because we're not having the mental health services that they need. You all, if we do not invest in mental health services for our kids, we are just damaging our future,” Love said. He also intends to push for free school lunches, but wants that lunch to be a quality one.
In public health, Love said he would make sure protect Medicaid, especially because of what cuts to the program could lead to. “What's going to end up happening is our rural health care system, is going to go away.”
The next speaker was Andrew Pritt, a candidate for Bradley County Judge who apologized that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Supha Xayprasith-Mays, who he advises. Xayprasith-Mays he described as a businesswoman who favors bringing growth to all areas of the state.
“We need to see growth in Hampton as well as Hot springs. We need to see growth in Rosston, not just Russellville. And we need to see growth even in little block, not just Little Rock. And when you have Supha Mays as your next governor, she has a vision as well and a plan to get there,” Pritt said.
Pritt said Xayprasith-Mays will be self-funded and that, unlike current Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee-Sanders she would be willing to “step up to the President and take them on, not go along.” Among her goals would be the empowerment of women through grants to those starting businesses, expanding rural health and rural small business development as well as a focus on tech business and making the most of the Smackover Lithium deposit found in Southwest Arkansas.
Concerning raising teacher pay, Pritt said a Xayprasith-Mays administration would “stop paying our teachers what they got paid in the 1980s. [We would] give them a living wage, not a minimum wage.”
In questioning, Love said he would take a multiple-pronged approach in the campaign, emphasizing the three priorities he stated at the beginning of his talk. He also touted the building of a health clinic in Southwest Little Rock as a promise made as he began service as a state senator and a promise delivered when it opened. A second one has also been built in the area, Love said.
To an inquirer who asked about Supha Xayprasith-Mays’ background, Britt said Supha is the daughter of a Hmong immigrant and Vietnam War veteran father and a mother who began an Asian-fusion restaurant in the state Delta
“Supha herself has two homes, one in Little Rock, one in Bentonville. She and her husband, Judge Richard Mays, together own the Soul of the South television [station] that you all may know about. They also own the radio station 98.7. She herself worked for Walmart. She has her own design house as well, and in addition to that, she's provided an internship for over 150 Arkansas students to be able to come up in the communications industry,” Britt said.
U.S. Senate candidates
First, Hallie Schoffner greeted the audience, admitting she was still recovering from the flu. She said she was a sixth-generation farmer taking on Tom Cotton. “I am also a working mom. I am a wife. I am the daughter of two senior parents. I am an entrepreneur, a small business owner, and I'm running, really I'm fighting. I'm taking this race to the mat for people of Arkansas,” she said.
Schoffner explained she had grown up farming alongside her parents in a small community named Schoffner that is near Newport. Her parents’ work ethic inspired her to do well in school and to pursue higher education. “I graduated top of my class at Newport High School. I got a full ride scholarship to Vanderbilt University. After graduating, I came home. I have a masters of public service from the Clinton School in Little Rock. I like to say I don't actually have a degree in farming, but I have a degree in the thing I'm running to do right now,” she said.
Returning to Schoffner to help her mother with the farm as her father was showing signs of Alzheimer’s. “One time, I had the very bad luck of having my son right in the middle of harvest. [But] it felt natural coming back to the farm. It was really, I think, what I was meant to do, and even in running the family farm, I was an advocate for environmental conservation, regenerative farming practices, the financial sustainability of small family farms like mine.” She spoke of lobbying Senator John Boozman on the Farm Bill, specifically on its environmental aspects.
Last year, she had to make the decision to the closing her family farm, which had been worked continuously for 150 years.
“In February, we joined hundreds of farmers here in Arkansas to make the heartbreaking condition to close the farm, because it did not matter what we did or what crops we planted, the math simply did not work,” Schoffner said. “So. I remember the day that I knew it was over. I had six different spreadsheets. I had the crops I thought I could plant, the money we could make, how much it would cost me, and not a single scenario was profitable, not one. I called my mom and I said, ‘Look, I can't guarantee that if we go another year, we might not be in a hole so deep that you might not lose the little land that you own or your house or your retirement.’”
About the way things stand today for farmers, Schoffner said, “I would like to tell you that the situation is better, but it's not. The farm crisis has deepened significantly in the United States. In Arkansas, we could lose as many as a third to half of all of our farmers, all of our farming operations.” When that occurs, Schoffner explained, a ripple effect of damage to businesses supporting farming will ensue that will affect the economy for workers in towns and cities.
Schoffner was invited to a town hall in Little Rock by current candidate for a second-district Congressional seat and 2022 candidate for governor Chris Jones to tell her story as her family farm was being liquidated. “As I stood on that stage in front of 800 people in a church in Little Rock strangers were literally hauling away the very last pieces of a 150-year-old operation from the combines and the tractors to the wrench sets. And instead of coming to that town hall, our elected officials were just a few miles away at a re-election fundraiser for Tom Cotton at $7,000 a plate.” Schoffner observed that Cotton still “has not said a meaningful word about Arkansas farmers.”
She characterized Cotton’s economic policy as “tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and land barons instead of [for] the millions of hard-working Arkansans in middle class families. He is actively undermining Social Security and Medicare because he believes that those are entitlement programs and not the benefits that our seniors have earned. He wants our seniors to work until they drop dead.”
Schoffner also criticized Cotton for his votes for legislation passed in 2025 variously called the Big, Beautiful Bill. “He just voted to gut Medicaid and SNAP to the hungriest state in the country. We are the most food insecure state in the country. I sit on the board of the Arkansas Food Bank. One in every four children here in the state of Arkansas will go to bed hungry tonight.”
Schoffner also noted Cotton had voted twice against the Farm Bill, which she called “the key piece of legislation upon which our very existence depends” and explained further how her priorities would differ from his. “As he lines his political pockets, I made a decision that if I can't do the thing that I wanted to do, if I can't farm, I'm going to fight on behalf of farmers and families and for the people of Arkansas, I am going to fight against corporate monopolies. I'm going to fight so that the people who need it most get the tax cuts. That's our working families and our small businesses. I will fight for my parents and all the seniors in this state who worked hard and deserve the lifeline that is Social Security and Medicare,” she said.
Commenting on how visible Cotton has been on Fox News and KATV 7, commenting on U.S. foreign and military policy, Schoffner said, “He just goes on national TV and steps on us for his ambitions. And you know why? In truth, he doesn't really like us. He talks to us like we're stupid. You can see it on his face, but we are not. This is Arkansas, dammit. We’re no strangers to making history. The last time we had a balanced budget in this country, it was an Arkansan in the White House.”
Finally, Schoffner commented on the progress of her campaign organization. “Since launching in July, we have raised now over a million dollars. We are breaking records for a Democrat running in the state of Arkansas in over a decade. But you know what? We don't want to get to November 4th, and say we wish we'd done more. I am asking you to give of your time and your money to make this race winnable,” she said.
“If you send me to the Senate, I will roll up my sleeves and get to work like a farmer.”
Next, U.S. Senate candidate Ethan Dunbar, mayor of Lewisville in Lafayette County said his candidacy is an extension of his faith, which calls on him to better his community. He said his 37 years in the U.S. Army, which he said lifted him from such poverty that the worth of his family members’ households would not have amounted to one piece of farm equipment at the Schoffner’s farm, had given him the experience and skills in forging relationships that are essential to getting the things done that improve living conditions.
He cast the race as one to make sure constitutional government and democracy continue to be upheld in the United States against the encroachments of autocratic tendencies coming from the White House. Schoffner, he said, in her emphasis on lifting up farmers was losing sight of the systemic improvements to the lives of Arkansans that are needed.
When asked by an attendee about “the elephant in the room,” Donald Trump, Schoffner said she did not want to confront Arkansas voters with their vote for Trump in an accusatory way but wanted to appeal to their attention to the pocket-book issues guiding their families’ decisions.
After the event, Schoffner’s campaign released a statement in response to the U.S. action against Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro, in which he and his wife were captured and taken to New York to face federal charges. In the statement, Schoffner says Cotton wants to “pour billions of dollars into another overseas crisis we will struggle to get out of,” and said that while he concentrates on another fight, she will work toward “fixing what’s broken here at home, like lowering costs, keeping farmers on their land and investing in the people who actually live and work in this country.”
Congressional candidates
Two candidates for the U.S. Congressional Fourth District, vying to be nominated to take on Republican incumbent Bruce Westerman both spoke.
First, Steve O’Donnell, a businessman from DeQueen who served in the U.S. Navy, has built apartments in multiple states and even worked at Hope’s Klipsch Inc., going from production worker to inventory manager, said he was running to bring public accountability to a Congressional seat that has not had it during Westerman’s term. He talked of his efforts to persuade Westerman to appear at a town hall in Hot Springs to take questions from constituents and being turned down even after offering to pay the cost of reserving the venue and organizing its promotion.
James Russell III acknowledged a tendency to speak off the cuff and recounted his having grown up in Lafayette County, just below the Hempstead County line. As O’Donnell had done, he emphasized his financial independence as a business owner with his wife of a mental health counselling firm and pledged he could not be intimidated. Both candidates, when asked why the U.S. House needed to be reclaimed by Democrat said this was necessary to check Republican policies that had done damage to working people’s quality of life. Russell said that while he would vote for and work with independents, he was running as a Democrat because it was the only one of the two major policies concerned with solving problems for working and middle class Americans.
Arkansas Supreme Court
Attorney John Adams of Little Rock is a nonpartisan running to unseat a Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointee from the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Position 3, Nicholas Bronni. He said Arkansans who usually skip voting on Supreme Court races should reconsider because of how crucial it is for a Supreme Court member to be an honest broker when it comes to making decisions on the language and on approval of voter initiatives. In recent years, the court has played a crucial role in striking down or altering voter written initiatives like those regarding medical and recreational use of marijuana as well as initiatives relating to the LEARNS act.
Adams mentioned his legal work successfully pleading the case for a group of Arkansas librarians who sought to have a provision in Arkansas Act 372, which called for librarians and booksellers to be jailed for providing minors with “harmful material.” In December 2024, a federal judge struck this provision down.
All the candidates stayed for questions and posed for photos. for about fifteen minutes after the Meet the Candidates session finished.
