The 2014 United States Senate election in Arkansas was held on November 4, 2014, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the state of Arkansas, concurrently with the election of the Governor of Arkansas, as well as other elections to the United States Senate in other states and elections to the United States House of Representatives and various state and local elections.
This was one of the seven Democratic-held Senate seats up for election in a state that Mitt Romney won in the 2012 presidential election. After facing only Green Party opposition in 2008, incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Pryor sought re-election to a third term in 2014. He was unopposed in the Democratic primary; U.S. Representative Tom Cotton was also unopposed for the Republican nomination. While the race was initially expected to be close, Cotton prevailed by a margin of 56% to 39%. The Associated Press called the race for Cotton immediately after the polls closed.
This is the last time a Senator from Arkansas lost re-election. Since Cotton took office in 2015, Republicans have held both of Arkansas' Senate seats and the state's entire congressional delegation, both of which had not happened since 1877. Pryor drew many comparisons to Blanche Lincoln, also a Democratic senator from Arkansas who was ultimately unseated in 2010, with Pryor receiving a similar fate.
Elected at age 37, Cotton surpassed Connecticut's Chris Murphy as the youngest incumbent senator at that time and remained so until the seating of MissouriâÂÂs Josh Hawley at the opening of the 116th United States Congress.
Arkansas Attorney General Mark Pryor was first elected to the Senate in 2002, defeating first-term Republican incumbent Tim Hutchinson. He was re-elected with 80% of the vote in 2008 as he was unopposed by a Republican candidate. He faced competition only from Green Party nominee Rebekah Kennedy, who won the largest share of the vote of any Green Party candidate in a Senate race in history. Of the 88 previous occasions when an incumbent senator was re-elected without major party opposition and then went on to contest the following general election, all 88 were re-elected.
Heading into the 2014 Cotton vs. Pryor matchup, only 17 House freshmen had been elected to the U.S. Senate over the last century, and just two in the last 40 years. In the 2014 cycle, Cotton and Montana's Steve Daines became the 18th and 19th freshmen to win U.S. Senate races since 1914.
The election was originally thought to be extremely close, which was backed up by polling. Tom Cotton ended up winning in a landslide against the incumbent, by 17.1 points. Cotton's victory, along with other Republican victories in other statewide elections, solidified the state's shift towards the GOP.
Cotton was unopposed for the Republican nomination.
Cotton won all four congressional districts.
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