By 2011, Arkansas was the last remaining southern state where Democrats still held the governorship and both houses of the legislature, and with them, the authority to redistrict. And at the rate the GOP is gaining, it may be the last decade Democrats get to redraw the state's four seats. So after 2010, when Republicans flipped Democrats' usual 3-to-1 seat majority by picking up the open 1st and 2nd districts, national Democratic strategists applied pressure on their Arkansas counterparts to radically revamp the state's map by creating a solidly Democratic black influence district linking Little Rock with the state's Delta region.
But what party strategists in Washington wanted fell on deaf ears in Little Rock, where Democrats' first order of business was protecting sole surviving Blue Dog Democrat Mike Ross in the southern 4th District. Complicating matters was the need to shift voters from fast-growing Northwest Arkansas's heavily Republican 3rd District to the slow-growing 4th District. Legislators soon abandoned Arkansas's tradition as one of three states to neatly keep counties whole - which had led to the nation's highest population
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