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they may be able to stop a GOP takeover of the state's top offices.
• "Sixteen days in October was a travesty," former North Little Rock Mayor Pat Hays told supporters as he launched his bid for a U.S. House seat in central Arkansas. "I wasn't thinking about running for Congress in the latter part of September, because I didn't think they would do what they did. "
• Now Hays is running for one of two open U.S. House seats that Democrats have grown more hopeful about winning, one of which opened days after the vote last week to end the shutdown. Republican U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin announced Monday he wouldn't seek re-election next year so he could focus on his family, and Hays was the first candidate to announce he'd run for the seat.
• With national polls showing Republicans taking a hit politically from the shutdown, Hays and other Democrats here see the issue as a chance to rebound from elections that have been defined by a Democratic president who remains deeply unpopular in the state.
• Republicans last year swept all four of Arkansas' U.S. House seats and won both chambers of the state Legislature after tying candidates to the president and his health care law. It was the same strategy that helped the GOP win three of the state's seven constitutional offices two years earlier and beat two-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln.
• But for Sen. Mark Pryor, targeted by Republicans eager to unseat the state's only Democrat in Washington, the shutdown could offer a chance to avoid the same fate in next year's election.
• The GOP needs to gain six seats to return to power in the U.S. Senate and their top targets are the last of the Southern Democrats in Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina, as well as Sen. Mark Begich in Alaska and seats in West Virginia, Montana and South Dakota.
• But Republicans' legitimate shot at reclaiming control of the Senate took a hit with the shutdown, and the sullied GOP image has become problematic for GOP House members across the country who are seeking Senate seats -- like U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, who is challenging Pryor.
• Even before lawmakers voted to re-open the government and raise the nation's borrowing limit, Pryor's campaign was eager to tie Cotton to the budget standoff that led to the shutdown. Pryor used the shutdown events to paint Cotton as too extreme, and his campaign plans to continue reminding voters of Cotton's support for tying any spending bills to efforts to defund the health care law, a move that led to the government shutdown.
• "Tom Cotton cost us billions...Cotton and a small group of reckless congressmen

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