Misty Orpin
State Sen. Jim Hendren’s nonprofit political organization Common Ground Arkansas named Misty Orpin as the executive director.
Orpin, a former reporter, was marketing director for Black Apple Cider in Springdale, founded by her husband, Leo, before she started ArkansasCOVID.com, a website that tracked the pandemic in Arkansas.
Hendren, the nephew of Gov. Asa Hutchinson, left the Republican Party in February and formed Common Ground, saying because he didn’t recognize his state party because of the political rancor.
“Our two-party system is broken,” Hendren said in a post on Common Ground’s website. “The discourse and division have grown to be too great. It’s preventing us from working together as a state or as a people.
“It’s time we — legislators, politicians, leaders, business owners, teachers, families, neighbors, friends, all of us — move forward by putting people over politics.”
Orpin said she met Hendren while she was working on ArkansasCOVID and the two realized they had some fundamental agreements on politics. Orpin acknowledged that she is further to the left than Hendren but the two realized they both believe the current political environment is too poisonous to accomplish what needs to be done for Arkansans.
Orpin said too much time and energy is spent on “hyper-partisan” issues that really aren’t important to a majority of people but stir up emotions that political parties and organizations use to raise money and obtain power.
“We just want to stop doing that because that destroys civil discourse, it destroys the ability for legislators to actually get the things done that help the people and solve problems,” Orpin said.
Previously: Arkansas Business interviewed Orpin last summer to talk about the ArkansasCOVID website.
In the posting on the website, Hendren wrote that Orpin’s experience makes her “the leader we need to build this movement.”
Orpin said Common Ground had chosen 10 members of its board of directors but will not release any names until the board, which is expected to have as many as 15 members, is finalized.
“We are making sure it is ideologically diverse but we are not ‘we have to have four liberals and four conservatives,’ ” Orpin said. “I feel the spectrum is false. People are very complex. We don’t rank people like that. We want to get away from that. We have a board that is full of really interesting, successful nuance humans.”
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