The push by Arkansas’s Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to build the state’s largest prison is being blocked by a handful of Republican state senators, concerned by its $825 million cost and the strain of 3,000 beds on the rural area’s gravel roads and water supply.
Her response? Oust two of them, Bryan King and Ronald Caldwell, in Tuesday’s Republican primaries.
The primary fights are highlighting the unapologetic power politics of a governor who is a clear favorite in November to win a second term, and a possible presidential candidate in 2028. Ms. Sanders has solidified a conservative majority on the state Supreme Court, commandeered the Board of Corrections and called for generational and ideological change in the legislature.
Now she is willing to remove any obstacle to her criminal justice agenda. In a state that is behind only Mississippi and Louisiana in incarcerations per capita,she has already reduced parole eligibility and mandated longer prison sentences.
She just needs a place to put all those prisoners.
“I stand with Republicans who actually want to change our state for the better, not obstructionist status quo politicians or pundits,” she said in a statement.
The prison, in Franklin County, would be in deeply conservative central western Arkansas. Ms. Sanders won 76 percent of the vote there in 2022, and President Trump captured 80 percent in 2024.
Yet J.B. Jackson, who lives across Highway 215 from the site, has festooned his property with signs like “Make AR Great Again — Impeach Sanders” and Halloween skeletons draped in anti-prison T-shirts. He also runs the Arkansas Alcatraz Facebook page, which shares videos and news excoriating the prison. The fact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have scouted the site as a potential detention facility makes the Alcatraz reference even more apt, he said.
State Senator Gary Stubblefield, who represented the district for more than a decade, vehemently opposed the project after Ms. Sanders announced it in October 2024. Mr. Stubblefield and other residents argued that the area lacked a sewer system, the nearest interstate was some 20 miles away, and the prison population alone would exceed the county seat of Charleston. Then Mr. Stubblefield died in September, prompting a special election to serve the balance of his term through 2028.
But both Brad Simon, 47, a franchise owner of a mosquito control company who won the Republican primary early this month, and Adam Watson, an independent, oppose the prison. Mr. Watson, 36, helped found Gravel and Grit, a new nonprofit that has probed “the intersection of campaign finance and prison profiteering.”
Ms. Sanders’s political action committee contributed $3,500 to Mr. Simon’s campaign after he won the Republican primary. She has been much more involved, and for much longer, in the races against Mr. King and Mr. Caldwell.
Mr. King, a poultry farmer, is the legislature’s most outspoken contrarian. He has been unafraid to blast the governor and anyone, really, on cryptocurrency, cronyism and more, and he has demanded an investigation into the prison, contending that the cost could exceed $1 billion.
“I’ve remained the same since I was in 2006 when I went in, which is about fiscal responsibility and conservatism,” Mr. King, 57, said at his home, “which unfortunately is dead with this governor.”
Mr. King’s and Mr. Caldwell’s constituents have been bombarded in recent weeks with mailers and texts attributed to opaque groups criticizing the senators as “weak on Communist China” who have allowed “woke liberals to indoctrinate our children.”
Mr. King’s opponent, Bobby Ballinger Jr., has vowed to defend “Arkansas from radical agendas.” He criticized Mr. King for voting present nearly one-third of the time in 2025, the second-highest of any legislator, according to a conservative economic policy group, Conduit for Commerce, which nonetheless ranked him the third most fiscally conservative senator.
Among the nonvotes Mr. Ballinger cited was on a bill to ban Chinese-made drones. Mr. King said he does vote present when he is undecided on a bill, or doesn’t trust the bill’s sponsor.
Bart Hester, who is the state senate’stop-ranking legislator, said Mr. King had become isolated in Little Rock because of his hostility to the governor’s agenda.
“The people that are opposing the governor, I believe, have a real hard time with a young, successful female leading the state,” Mr. Hester said over breakfast at a Springdale, Ark., cafe that is in the Arkansas Food Hall of Fame.
In typical fashion, Mr. King did not hold back in his response. “Bart Hester is a liar and he’s a hypocrite,” he said.
Mr. Hester, 48, praised the prison proposal for bringing prison development closer to the state’s fast-growing northwest. He said he was proud to be part of a cohort of young and energetic legislators who were in sync with Ms. Sanders, 43.
Mr. Caldwell, the other legislator in Ms. Sanders’s cross hairs, lacks Mr. King’s pugilism. A retired businessman who has represented a sprawling 10-county area east of Little Rock since 2013, Mr. Caldwell, 75, said during a tour of his district that he has voted with the governor “probably 98, 99 percent of the time.” He credited her with assisting the area’s recovery efforts after a devastating tornado in 2023.
But he opposes the prison over its cost and has been lukewarm on her education and private-school tuition voucher program, as well as her efforts to restrict the state’s Freedom of Information Act.
“The system has set up that there are three separate branches of government, and I think that’s where we should be,” he said. “It’s not a personal thing at all.”
His opponent, Trey Bohannan, 50, owns a construction and landscaping business. Nicknamed “BoDirt” because he likes “getting his hands dirty,” he has built a large following on TikTok as a brash, blue-collar outsider, and touts himself “as Republican as they come — pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Trump, period.”
Mr. Bohannan has been on the defensive over his recent arrival to the districtand his business association with a man who was convicted of stalking a teenager online.
In a statement, he said Mr. Caldwell was “Donald Trump’s worst enemy in the State Senate” for opposing vouchers and embracing renewable energy, especially Mr. Trump’s hated wind power. Mr. Caldwell called that misleading.
Mr. Bohannan openly framed the elections as a loyalty test more than a policy debate.
“This race is going to come down to who will support Donald Trump,” he said, “and stand with Governor Sanders.”
David W. Chen is a Times reporter focused on state legislatures, state level policymaking and the political forces behind them.
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