Guest Opinion Article
by: Margot Herzl*
June 18, 2026
The End of the World as We Knew It
In October of 2020, the American public, by and large, believed they were living in a system of self-governance. There were Republicans and Democrats, Republican-voting Independents, and Democrat-voting Independents, and there were the 3% of people who would never vote for either party. But everyone more or less thought that elections were a sound and secure process for choosing leaders, and though some might grumble at the outcomes, people generally believed that those in elected office were chosen by their friends and neighbors, and that said politicians were intent on bringing to fruition the platforms of the parties they represented.
But November of 2020 blew that belief right out of the water. When people saw the presidential election flip from Donald Trump to Joe Biden overnight – with Biden garnering 81 million votes, when no candidate had previously exceeded 66 million votes – it became clear that something was deeply wrong. The American public decided that they needed to take a more active hand, not only in selecting politicians to represent them, but also in guiding the policies those politicians would be expected to support.
The revolution that began then may have been of a polite and civilized nature – not a guillotine in sight – but it was a revolution nonetheless.
At the Federal level, we all saw with our own eyes the treatment received by the peaceful protestors on January 6th who gathered at the US Capitol to say, “We do not consent to the open theft of our elections.” We saw how Federal agitators staged a violent conflict in order to discredit the protest, and we saw our government throw hundreds of peaceful people into prison without trial. We saw how the free speech platform Parler was shut down overnight, and all of its content purged from Amazon’s web-hosting services. Parler had thousands of first-hand livestreamed video accounts of the events of January 6th, which showed the federal agitators, and showed peaceful crowds being escorted into the Capitol at the invitation of Capitol Police.
Far from shutting down the incipient revolution, this series of events galvanized the public: “This is our country, and we’re taking it back.” Freed from the geographic anchor of employment by recent COVID lockdowns, people started to migrate to states where they believed the citizenry thought like themselves, looking to increase their voice by voting alongside like-minded people.
By 2022, the peaceful revolution was fully underway, with the most emblematic moment being the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, and its rebranding as “X,” for the express purpose of protecting free speech.
The People Rising: Arkansas
Here in Arkansas, we were having our own quiet revolution, which ran headlong into a Republican Establishment that had grown too accustomed to unchecked power.
As all readers are likely aware, Arkansas has been a thoroughly Republican state for over a decade, so the revolution here was aimed more at shoring up, rather than overthrowing, and the people expected to have the full support of the legislature and of Republican leadership. After all, corruption is a Democrat problem, right?
A new faction of the public, styling themselves “Patriots,” took over a number of Arkansas’s Republican organizations at the county level, and there was a serious push for improved election integrity. This push had two main strains: 1) hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots with same-day voting; and 2) closed primaries.
Some may not be aware – but until about 12 days ago, it was legal for registered Democrats to run as Republican candidates in the Republican Primary elections in Arkansas, and all they had to do was pay a filing fee. It was also legal until the 2026 Primary election cycle for registered Democrats to vote in Republican primaries.
This issue of closing the primaries (such that only Republicans could participate in Republican primary elections) was first raised by members of the grassroots patriot movement at the 2022 State Republican Convention. Party members submitted proposals to put closed primaries into both the party’s platform and its rules
A Facade of Civility
And now for the first time in the history of the Republican Party of Arkansas, the party refused to notify delegates to the convention that proposals had been made. They said closed primaries were “not recommended,” and delegates showed up at the convention having never seen the proposals. The RPA also blocked the delegation from Pulaski County – the state’s capitol – from being seated, based on a fabricated balloting issue. Pulaski County had 71 grassroots patriot delegates.
The motion to add closed primaries to the party platform was still allowed at the 2022 convention – because everyone understood that the submissions had met the long-standing notice requirements for adoption by the convention (60 days’ written notice). The convention adopted closed primaries into the party platform, despite the exclusion of Pulaski County’s delegation.
However, the motion to add closed primaries to the party’s rules – which would have actually accomplished the act of closing the Republican primary – was blocked with a line which has become quite familiar to all of the party’s grassroots activists over the past four years: “You can’t do that – it’s illegal.”
Perhaps for some this line wasn’t a lie, but it was at the very least not true, as illustrated by the fact that the Republican Party adopted a proposal of this kind in 2025, which closed Republican primary elections to prevent participation of registered Democrats.
You might say that 2022 was the polite revolution saying to the Republican establishment, “We’re here, we have concerns, the rules give us the right to speak, and you need to listen.” The establishment said, “No.”
Not Taking “No” for an Answer
The 2023-2024 political cycle was a new phase of the revolution: the people said, “We asked politely, and you haven’t listened. Now we’re going to make you listen (because the rules give us the power to do that).” A groundswell of thousands of activists from all across the state led to the following wins for the peaceful revolution in ‘23&’24:
- Searcy County adopted hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots and ran its 2024 elections using that method (while the rest of the state used machine-marked, machine-counted ballots).
- Nine other counties ran petitions to put the issue of paper ballots to the voters and garnered the necessary signatures. While the county clerks of all nine counties initially refused to put the issue on the ballot, the courts compelled Independence County to do so, and Independence County voters approved the measure by a 2-1 margin.
- Grassroots patriots swept the 2024 Republican State Convention (the final authority for all things concerning the Republican party, according to its own rules).
o They changed the party’s platform, adding:
- Medical Freedom (freedom from medical coercion, including forced vaccination, lockdowns, and silencing of medical professionals);
- Freedom of contract (free association);
- Election Integrity (hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots);
- Partisan judicial elections;
- Support for FOIA, in response to the Governor securing for herself an exemption from transparency laws;
- Opposition to ESG (Environmental Social Governance), social credit scores, and globalist organizations;
- The convention also removed from the party platform support for government “economic development” investments, otherwise known as corporate welfare, or “tax and spend” initiatives.
· Every single one of these changes was “not recommended” by the Republican Establishment, but was adopted by the state convention anyway.
o Grassroots patriots also changed the party’s rules:
- Requiring candidates who bear the “Republican” label to register as Republicans;
- Requiring voters who wish to cast a Republican primary ballot to register as Republicans;
- Requiring the Republican Party to have future conventions centrally located so as to maximize convenience for all 75 Arkansas counties (the 2024 convention was in Rogers);
- Increasing the representation of each county on its Congressional District Committee;
- Declaring that all members of the Republican Party’s governing board (the State Committee) would need to be elected, and that public office holders would no longer have automatic votes on that board;
- Requiring that the party’s committees on the platform and rules be elected by the membership, rather than solely appointed by the RPA chairman.
· Every single one of these changes was “not recommended” by the Republican Establishment, but was adopted by the state convention anyway.
o The convention also adopted a resolution requiring that members of Republican Party Committees not be political lobbyists, Arkansas elected officials, or direct employees of Arkansas elected officials.
– Many grassroots patriots were elected to Arkansas’s 2024 RNC delegation to Milwaukee.
In short, the people declared, “This business of political parties is meant to elevate the voices and ideas of the people from the bottom up – not to cram the opinions of a few down on the masses from above.”
The RPA establishment had, of course, attempted preemptive damage control ahead of the 2024 convention, because they could see the groundswell coming: first they held a vote ahead of the 2024 convention, attempting to increase the voting threshold that would be required for the convention to conduct business – but that vote failed. Next, they gave all of the above-referenced proposals the “not recommended” designation and refused to distribute them to delegates. Next, they read a brand-new interpretation into the RPA Rules, and said, “If we haven’t told the delegates about your proposals, then you won’t be allowed to consider them.” Next, the party’s then-secretary, Julie Harris, refused to let the committee on convention credentials even see the list of people whom the RPA was credentialing to vote at the convention (and on the day of the convention, several people who were not elected delegates – such as Asa Hutchinson – were given voting lanyards by the RPA establishment). Finally, they only rented the convention hall for a few hours and tried to turf the convention out before their business was concluded.
Yet the grassroots patriots overcame every one of these hurdles to deliver historic victories for the people of Arkansas.
Dropping the Jackboot
That’s when the establishment went mask-down.
The Republican establishment simply declared the business of the convention – the final authority in all party matters, and the house of the people – null and void. Since the full State Committee (the party’s governing board) holds the interim delegated authority from the convention, it could plausibly be argued that such a serious matter could perhaps have been debated and decided there – but instead, the decision was made by a handful of people on the Executive Committee, which has an almost purely administrative role.
But the establishment didn’t stop there.
They began to purge the grassroots patriots from the Republican Party. They exploited an internal division in Saline County to dissolve the entire county’s Republican Party; they expelled the leadership of Craighead County’s Republican Party; they expelled the chairman of Pulaski County, and various members of Garland County and Hot Spring County. People of conscience quit the Republican Party in droves.
By 2026, 60% of all counties had new chairmen.
The establishment also used Barbara Tillman – a prominent party member from Benton County – to try to blunt the grassroots patriot movement under the false pretense of “cooperation.” The message was essentially: “We can all get along, if you’ll just exclude these particular grassroots people that we don’t like, and you stop doing rude things like trying to enforce the rules.”
The establishment also discovered a new underhanded tactic:
It’s part of the basic duties of a secretary in any organization to give notice to members of anything significant which is due to appear on the agenda of an upcoming meeting. But the party said: “What if we just don’t give notice?” They instructed the secretary of the party (now Sharon Stuthard, a member of the Washington County Republican Committee) to simply leave all items of business out of the call for state board meetings, and in this way, they prevented the party from doing business for the last two years
Convention 2026
So this leads us to June 6th of 2026. The people had managed to cobble together a rag-tag group, some of whom were remnants of the grassroots patriot movement who survived the RPA’s purge, some of whom were more old-guard Republicans for whom the RPA’s tactics had become too dirty and distasteful, and some of whom were new blood, who had heard stories but hadn’t seen the battle firsthand.
After two years of the establishment bludgeoning the people of Arkansas into the ground, the people had much more modest ambitions than they did in 2024. In ‘24, the people rewrote the Republican Party Platform and Rules, turning the party into a party “of the people.” But in 2026 the very narrow goal was simply to compel the RPA’s Secretary to start including business in the meeting calls again, so that the party would once more be allowed to consider doing business of any kind.
However, the RPA establishment is unwilling even to tolerate this simple improvement. They have fully committed themselves to a paradigm of totalitarian rule. They said the proposal to have the secretary include business in meeting calls was “not recommended;” they did not distribute the proposal; and they left any place for its consideration out of the convention agenda.
Furthermore, they took steps to ensure that as few people as possible from across the state would be eligible to vote at the convention.
Delegates to the convention are elected by county conventions, which it is the responsibility of county chairmen to organize and run. However, as mentioned earlier, 60% of all county chairmen are new after the last two years of the RPA’s heavy-handed purges. They did not know how to run conventions, and many didn’t know that they had to.
There is also a provision in the RPA Rules that puts responsibility for ensuring that counties hold conventions squarely on the shoulders of the State Chairman, currently Joseph Wood. But Wood did not take any steps to train new chairmen and ensure that they were able to do their jobs.
Remarkably, despite this dereliction of duty by the RPA State Chairman, all but 12 of Arkansas’s counties did successfully hold conventions and elect delegates prior to June 6th. However, nine of the counties which held conventions submitted their delegate lists more than 10 days after those delegates were elected, and the RPA used a secretarial deadline in the rules (originally written for the sake of convenience, and with no such penalty attached) to deny representation to those nine counties. Note that for all prior conventions, late submissions had not resulted in counties being blocked from the roll. They also made a claim of rule-breaking against Lawrence County (where there was none), and denied Washington County’s 55 delegates by claiming they violated a notice requirement which doesn’t actually exist.
Despite this, the rag-tag coalition of The People still had 55% of the vote at the 2026 Convention, and managed to elect their chosen convention chairman. Unfortunately, this small margin wasn’t enough to overcome the RPA’s final underhanded strategy: seat all of “their people” in the front so that their voice votes sounded twice as loud.
The people of Arkansas had to walk away from the 2026 convention without accomplishing their goal of forcing the Republican Party to let them do business again. The establishment still has the ability to stop all party business simply by refusing to tell anyone about it ahead of time.
Why is this important?
Republicans hold all positions in Arkansas’s Federal delegation, and all State Constitutional Offices, from the Governor down to the Commissioner of Lands. They hold supermajorities exceeding 80% in both houses of the state General Assembly and control 88% of county governments. The Republican Party of Arkansas is the uncontested power in this state – and right now it is obsessed with protecting that power from its own voters.
The consequences are already visible. The Governor granted herself an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act. Petition rights for citizens have been restricted. Arkansas now labors under roughly 80,000 pages of administrative rules – the predictable result of lazy legislation that passes vague laws and leaves the real rulemaking to unelected boards and bureaucrats. The Franklin prison scandal exposed serious failures in oversight. With rare exceptions, our elected officials operate with impunity because the party apparatus has successfully steamrolled the voice and priorities of the average Arkansan.
Elected politicians have one fail-safe way to protect their positions: listen to voters and act in accordance with their concerns. But real accountability would mean giving up the freedom to serve personal and insider interests.
We cannot let them get away with this. Perhaps 90% of the people will have to stand up and say “We are Arkansas!” – but it can be done. And if we win our state, then perhaps we can also win back our country.
*Margot Herzl is a Member of the Republican State Committee in Arkansas, President of the Ozark Republican Women, Searcy County Election Coordinator, and Secretary of the Searcy County Republican Committee. She was a State Convention Delegate in 2022, 2024, and 2026, and an Alternate Delegate to the RNC in 2024.
