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What to Watch For in Today’s Arkansas Senate Debate on AETN

3 min read

LITTLE ROCK — They’ve been running for more than a year and have spent, along with outside groups, more than $32 million on a race that could decide which party controls the U.S. Senate. The only thing that’s been missing in the contest between Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor and Republican challenger U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton has been a head-to-head debate.

That changes Monday, when the two face off in the first of two televised debates. The rivals are appearing alongside Libertarian nominee Nathan LaFrance and Green Party nominee Mark Swaney.

Here are some key issues and themes likely to emerge in Monday’s debate, which will be taped in the afternoon and aired on the Arkansas Educational Television Network at night.

(Watch Live: You can watch a livestream of the debate on this page at 2 p.m.)

FOREIGN POLICY

This is the only one of the two scheduled Senate debates that includes foreign policy, an area where Republicans believe Cotton has an edge because of his background as an Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cotton accused Pryor of being “weak and unsteady” on national security after the congressional delegation voted last month to give the president authority to train and arm Syrian rebels. Cotton criticized Pryor for authoring an amendment in July that proposed blocking a similar request.

Pryor’s campaign said he supported the latest request because it included safeguard and oversight measures, including a requirement that the Defense Department report how it will track the equipment and prevent it from falling into terrorists’ hands.

FARM BILL

The debate will likely include a clash over Cotton’s vote against the farm bill, an issue where Pryor has been trying to cast his rival as out of touch with a state that relies heavily on agriculture.

Cotton was the only member of the state’s congressional delegation to vote against the nearly $100 billion-a-year legislation in January. He defended the vote in a recent TV spot, saying the president “hijacked the farm bill and turned it into a food stamp bill.”

Combining the food stamp money with the farm bill is a practice that predates the Obama administration by several decades. Republicans in the House tried to separate the two last year, and Cotton voted for both a stand-alone farm bill and a separate bill that would have cut the food stamp program by 5 percent. But GOP leaders eventually agreed to combine the bills in an attempt to get a farm bill passed, and the final version cut the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program by $800 million a year, or 1 percent.

HEALTH CARE

An issue virtually guaranteed to come up during the debate is the federal health overhaul, with Republicans successfully running against the measure they have derided as “Obamacare” over the past two election cycles.

Cotton regularly criticizes Pryor for voting for the health overhaul and has called for the repeal of a law he argues hurts businesses.

Pryor has been defending his vote in an ad where he touts the benefits of the health care law — without naming it — and says his battle with a rare form of cancer 18 years ago influenced him.

The fight over the health law comes as Arkansas has seen a major drop in its uninsured following the state expanding Medicaid under the overhaul. According to a Gallup survey released in August, the share of uninsured residents in Arkansas dropped about 10 percentage points — from 22.5 percent in 2013, to 12.4 percent in the middle of this year.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Pryor and Cotton are wasting little time before Round 2. They square off Tuesday night in Fayetteville in a debate broadcast live by Little Rock television station KATV, Jonesboro TV station KAIT and northwest Arkansas station KHBS/KHOG. Unlike Monday’s debate, this one will only feature Pryor and Cotton.

(Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten, broadcast or distributed.)
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