The political and commercial capital of Arkansas, Little Rock dominates the 2nd. The city and surrounding Pulaski County have a combined population of almost 350,000 -- nearly 60 percent of the district's total -- and their political weight is usually enough to determine the outcome of the 2nd's elections.

With a population one-third black and a well-organized labor community, Little Rock is a Democratic stronghold. The suburbs along the Arkansas River bluffs are home to a large managerial and professional community that prefers to vote Republican, but it will support moderate, business-minded Democrats. Bill Clinton got 58 percent of Pulaski County's 1992 presidential vote, several points above his statewide average. (Four years earlier, Pulaski went comfortably for George Bush.)

Little Rock did not experience anything like the boom felt by other Sun Belt cities during the 1980s, but the city's 10 percent growth was more than triple that of the state as a whole. Together with North Little Rock -- a much smaller, separately incorporated city just across the Arkansas River -- Little Rock is more insulated from economic downturns than other parts of Arkansas because of the state government presence, as well as the legal and service industries that support it. Little Rock is also home to a large branch of the University of Arkansas (11,200 students) and to five major hospitals that serve the metropolitan area and outlying rural communities. There is also a military component in the economy: Little Rock Air Force Base, in northeastern Pulaski County near the town of Jacksonville, has more than 6,500 active-duty personnel.

Once a symbol of the resistance to desegregating public schools in the South, Little Rock today has shed much of its racial tension, and in 1990 the city electorate approved a local tax increase to boost funding for the school system.

Downtown Little Rock has a spruced-up business corridor and convention center, but the retail trade has moved to the western suburbs, home to the more affluent residents. Poor and working-class blacks live in east Little Rock.

Many whites have left the city for the once-rural counties that surround Pulaski. While the 20 percent growth in Saline and Faulkner counties during the 1980s weakened their Democratic traditions, the GOP lacks organization here. And Democrats still find a hospitable union movement in the aluminum industry in Saline, the nation's prime domestic source of bauxite.

Republicans have a longer tradition in rural White County, to the east. The GOP has perhaps its strongest organization in the state here, bolstered by the firmly conservative intellectual direction from the academic community at Harding University (3,200 students), an institution affiliated with the Church of Christ. Rural Conway, Yell and Perry counties are more confirmed in their Democratic habits.