Tom Cotton

Candidate for United States Senator in Arkansas

Tom Cotton is running for United States Senator in Arkansas. He has been one of our senators since 2015, so we can judge how he has affected our lives during his 11 year tenure.

Incumbent

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As a United States Senator, Tom Cotton is a member of the United States Congress. Congress enacts laws that influence the daily lives of all Americans and is intended to serve as the voice of the people. Its responsibilities include funding government functions and programs, holding hearings to inform the legislative process, and oversight of the executive branch.

Performance Review

Did Tom Cotton make our lives better or worse ?

Increasing the Cost of Living
Reducing Access to Healthcare
Destroying Arkansan Farmers
Cutting Taxes for the Rich
Rolling Back Environmental Protections
Driving Economic Growth
Cutting Access to Food Programs for the Poor
Destroying Jobs
Gaslighting and Lying To Us
Working for Billionaires, Big Business and Outsiders, Not for Us
Letting Elon Musk and DOGE Cut Funds from Arkansas
Abdicating His Responsibility
Opposing Common-Sense Gun Safety Laws
Cutting Social Security
Giving the Government Control of Our Bodies
Taking Away Our Voting Power
Using the U.S. Military Against Americans
Supporting America's Secret Police Force, ICE
Voting for an Unnecessary and Unpopular War in Iran
Missing in Action
starvoters point of view
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Arkansas Report Card

Increasing the Cost of Living

Food, rent, electricity, healthcare - in America we should be able to afford these basic necessities of life without going bankrupt.

Tom Cotton has supported the current administration's tariffs and other policies which have led to:

Half of all Americans struggling to afford groceries
47% struggling to afford their utility bills
47% struggling to afford healthcare
48% struggling to afford housing
1 in 4 Americans saying they have skipped a medical checkup due to affordability
23% skipping a prescription dose

Arkansas has the highest food insecurity rate in the country and one of the lowest median incomes. What is Tom Cotton doing about that? Making things worse. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Reducing Access to Healthcare

We all deserve access to quality healthcare so we can live healthy and productive lives.

Tom Cotton disagrees:

He voted to cut more than $1 trillion in federal health care and food assistance as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act"
He voted to let ACA tax credits expire, increasing health costs for millions of Americans, driving many of them to switch to cheaper plans or abandon health insurance coverage altogether. And the less people there are with coverage, the higher the rest of our premiums will be.
He wants to repeal the ACA, reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and add work requirements to Medicaid.
Arkansas stands to lose an estimated $8–11 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade. This will lead to fewer doctors, more strain on rural hospitals (in Arkansas many will shut down), and worse outcomes for families who already struggle to access care
He supported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s nomination for Health and Human Services Secretary, which has proven to be disastrous for American health.

Arkansas is scraping the bottom of the barrel for overall health, women's health, maternal mortality, infant mortality, obesity and life expectancy. What is Tom Cotton doing about that? Making things worse. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Destroying Arkansan Farmers

Farming is the largest industry in Arkansas, contributing over $24 billion to the Arkansas economy and representing 14% of the state’s entire economic output. Tom Cotton voted against the Farm Bill that would help our farmers in both 2014 and 2018, and supported the tariffs and trade war with China that have decimated Arkansan farmers in 2025. To add insult to injury, he's done nothing to stop the government from sending $40 billion of our taxpayer money to Argentina to support our farmers' direct competitors, while only giving American farmers a $12 billion dollar bailout.

Tom Cotton has failed Arkansan farmers. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Cutting Taxes for the Rich

We all need to pay our fair share to the government so it can provide the services that benefit all of us.

But billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and nurses. That's not fair.

The wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.
The 25 richest Americans paid $13.6 billion in taxes from 2014-2018 — a “true” tax rate of just 3.4 percent on $401 billion of income.
23 of the largest and most profitable companies in the US paid no federal corporate income taxes from 2018-2022. And 109 corporations paid zero federal tax in at least one of those years.

Tom Cotton is on the side of the billionaires and big business. The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that he supported will reduce taxes for the top 1 percent of taxpayers by more than $1 trillion over the next decade, while raising taxes for the poorest Americans. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Rolling Back Environmental Protections

We all deserve clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet to live on.

Tom Cotton has supported the repealing and rolling back of environmental protections and climate change regulations, all so that billionaires and big business can plunder natural resources and destroy our environment in the name of profit.

We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Driving Economic Growth

Our senator should be working to drive economic growth in our state. Working with Congressman Steve Womack and Senator John Boozman, Tom Cotton has secured investments in Ebbing Air National Guard Base in Fort Smith, Arkansas that will have a projected $1 billion economic impact on the Fort Smith metro (although the analysis that led to the $1 billion projection has never been shared).

starvoters pov: 👍

Cutting Access to Food Programs for the Poor

I think we can all agree that nobody in America, the richest country in the world, should go hungry.

Here in Arkansas we're already the worst state in the nation for food insecurity, where 1 in 4 kids faces hunger. And instead of doing anything to fix that, Tom Cotton supported the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that dramatically cuts funding for SNAP, and the people that need food assistance most.

About 39% of SNAP participants are children, and 20% are elderly
41.7 million Americans receive SNAP benefits every month
240,000 Arkansans receive SNAP benefits every month

Tom Cotton doesn't care if Americans or Arkansans go hungry. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Destroying Jobs

A good job where we can make a living to support our families, own a home, and have a good life. That's the American Dream.

Tom Cotton supports policies and an administration that are turning the American Dream into a nightmare.

There were 20.8 million layoffs in the U.S. in 2025
There were 118,000 layoffs in Arkansas between January and August 2025
55% of employed Americans say they're concerned about losing their jobs
The unemployment rate is 4.6%, the highest level since the pandemic
In 2025 the U.S. economy averaged just 15,000 jobs added per month, a dramatic decrease from the monthly average of 125,000 the year before Trump took office.
Overall employment for workers without college degrees fell by 361,000 jobs from January to September 2025.
58,000 net manufacturing jobs have been lost from April, when the administration announced “Liberation Day” tariffs, to September 2025.

We can't live the American Dream without well-paying jobs. Tom Cotton doesn't care. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Gaslighting and Lying To Us

When did it become okay for our leaders to lie to us? Do they think we're too stupid to check facts? Or do they just think that we're suckers that are easily manipulated and will fall for their con?

Tom Cotton lies, distorts and misrepresents the facts ALL. THE. TIME. If we can't trust him to tell us the truth, how can we trust him with our lives and futures?

You can see links to his lies below, but we want to call attention to one in particular. A Tom Cotton PAC based in Alabama has been texting attack ads to thousands of Arkansans about his opponent Hallie Shoffner. These texts are the most blatant lying, fear-mongering and emotional manipulation that you can imagine, and have nothing to do with making our lives better. Their only goal is to make us afraid of "them". Because when we're afraid of some made up boogeyman, we're distracted from the fact that Tom Cotton is working really hard to make our lives WORSE.

We're too smart to fall for this garbage. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Truth matters.

Working for Billionaires, Big Business and Outsiders, Not for Us

Our elected officials should work for us, the people.

Tom Cotton works for billionaires and big business. The billionaire Koch brothers funded his initial election, and he worked directly with them to create the policies that benefited them, and hurt us. He has taken millions from right-wing pro-Israel donors and big business, and 88% of his funding comes from outside of Arkansas.

Tom Cotton is owned by billionaires, big business and outsiders. No wonder he's not doing anything to improve OUR lives. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Letting Elon Musk and DOGE Cut Funds from Arkansas

We all want a government that works for us as efficiently and effectively as possible. Unfortunately our government doesn't always work that way, so reform is badly needed. Given how big and complicated the government is, it's a tough problem that needs well-thought out solutions, so that we don't make things worse.

That's not what we got.

Tom Cotton stood idly by while billionaire and ketamine-addled chaos monkey Elon Musk and his DOGE goons chainsawed their way through the U.S. government, promising to save the government at least $2 trillion annually in waste, fraud and abuse. Because they had no idea what they were doing and no one to stop them, in the end our government suffered, people suffered, Arkansas suffered, government spending actually went UP and Elon Musk became even richer.

Elon Musk and DOGE:

Had access to and exfiltrated (stole) all our sensitive personal information.
Kneecapped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had returned over $26 billion to the American people since 2011.
Attempted to cut $4 billion in funding for medical research.
Will cost the federal government an estimated $500 billion in lost tax revenue (that could pay for programs for us), due to cuts at the IRS.
Disrupted the federal response to the bird flu outbreak, which directly affected Arkansas.
Laid waste to the employees at several government departments, removing their top experts and most skilled practitioners, and making their services less effective for all of us. This badly affected veterans, who make up 30% of the federal workforce.
Destroyed USAID, which through its Food for Peace Program typically buys around $2 billion of American crops annually to distribute to impoverished countries. And some of that money usually comes to Arkansas, which produces roughly 40% of all rice in the U.S.
And the list goes on...

We'd like to thank you, Tom Cotton, for doing absolutely nothing while an unelected South African big tech billionaire took a chainsaw to vital U.S. government functions, cut an estimated $364 million dollars worth of grants and leases from Arkansas, and completely failed to make the government more efficient. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: This was nothing but a giant con pulled on the American people.

Abdicating His Responsibility

As a member of Congress, part of Tom Cotton's job is to act as a check and balance to the executive branch. He and his fellow members of Congress from Arkansas (Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman) have completely abdicated their responsibility. These spineless cowards are rubber stamping everything the current administration wants to do, no matter how crazy, dangerous or harmful. And we've seen the results. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not doing his job, and the whole country is suffering as a result.

Opposing Common-Sense Gun Safety Laws

We deserve to feel safe in our neighborhoods, schools, and places of worship.

In order to do that, we need to take real steps to prevent gun violence. And despite what we've been told, it is possible to support the 2nd Amendment and support common-sense gun safety laws at the same time. But Tom Cotton is owned by the NRA, so has opposed bipartisan gun safety laws and is actually trying to expand gun rights, while offering meaningless thoughts and prayers every time there's a new mass shooting.

A child or adolescent is killed with a gun every 2 hours and 48 minutes in the U.S.
Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the U.S. are 33 times greater than in Australia and 77 times greater than in Germany
Every day, 125 Americans are killed with guns, and more than 200 are shot and wounded
Women in the U.S. are 28 times more likely to be killed with a gun than women in other high-income countries.
Arkansas is one of the worst states in the U.S. for violent crime, murder and firearm deaths.

Tom Cotton is OK with our kids dying, as long as he has his guns. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Giving the Government Control of Our Bodies

America is the land of FREEDOM. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to start a business, freedom to choose your own career path, freedom to make your own medical decisions, freedom to raise your children according to your values, and freedom to pursue happiness. Freedom is what makes America great.

Unless you're a woman and you're making the deeply personal decision about whether to have a baby or not. A decision that will dramatically affect the rest of your life. In that case Tom Cotton thinks that your freedom doesn't matter and that the government should get to control your body. That's not freedom, that's tyranny.

Tom Cotton:

Opposed Roe v. Wade
Supported federal efforts to ban abortion
Supported so-called fetal personhood legislation
Praised states' egregious abortion bans
Attacked Planned Parenthood throughout his career
Opposed efforts to ensure members of the military had access to abortion
Was hostile to contraception access
Supported efforts to restrict minors’ access to abortion

District 3 candidate (and pastor) Robb Ryerse stated it well: "Abortion should remain safe and legal. These are personal decisions best made by patients, their doctors, and their faith — not politicians. You don’t have to agree with every decision someone makes to believe they should be free to make it. That’s what personal liberty means." Almost 2/3 of Americans agree and believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But Tom Cotton thinks he knows better, and doesn't believe that we should have the freedom to make our own decisions. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Taking Away Our Voting Power

Arkansas's state motto is "Regnat Populus", a Latin phrase meaning "The People Rule". Unfortunately that's not a sentiment that Tom Cotton's billionaire and big business donors can stomach. Because when we have voting power, we use it to make our lives better, and they lose power. Read about all the ways they're trying to take away our voting power on the starvoters home page, then come back here.

Tom Cotton has opposed legislation to make voting easier while supporting the SAVE Act, which would force every single American citizen to prove their citizenship status in person when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. For the vast majority of Americans, this would mean presenting a passport or birth certificate at their local election office. This would disenfanchise millions of U.S. citizens: 146 million Americans do not have a passport, and 69 million women who have married do not have a birth certificate that matches their new legal name. Working-class and low-income Americans would also be disproportionately disenfranchised if the bill became law, as the vast majority of these groups do not possess a passport.

YOU HAVE POWER. Why else do you think Tom Cotton and his owners are working so hard to take it away? Don't let them. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Using the U.S. Military Against Americans

Whether white, black, or brown, we should all be able to live in America and exercise our constitutional rights without fear that our military will turn on us.

But Tom Cotton really really wants to incite violence so he can send in the troops.

In 2020 during the George Floyd Protests he wrote an essay in the New York Times calling to invoke the Insurrection Action and send in federal troops to quell the protests.
In 2025 the administration provoked citizens when they sent ICE into Los Angeles followed by the National Guard. When Americans protested, Tom Cotton again suggested sending in federal troops to quell the protests, this time in the Wall Street Journal.
He has supported the current administrations deployments of ICE, DHS and the National Guard to cities that don't want them, in order to provoke violence and unrest.

Tom Cotton seems incredibly eager to use the U.S. military against us, his fellow Americans, and is supporting the current administration's constant provocations of violence. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is not fighting for us. He is actively working against us.

Supporting America's Secret Police Force, ICE

Whether white, black, or brown, we should all be able to live in America and exercise our constitutional rights without fear that law enforcement will turn on us.

But the current administration has created a secret police force that is abusing their power against anyone who stands in their way, U.S. citizen or not. They claim to be going after "the worst of the worst", but are taking daycare workers, day laborers, grandmas and kids who are valued members of our communities. And Tom Cotton, staunch defender of the Second Amendment to fight back against government tyranny, is doing absolutely nothing while the government tyrannizes us. Worse than that he supports it. Which probably shouldn't be that much of a surprise from someone who really wants to use the military against the American people.

ProPublica: They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world's most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force.
ProPublica: Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they're showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can't access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there's a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.
New York Times: Masked and heavily armed, ICE agents are sent to cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis to terrorize immigrant communities and brutalize people who challenge their efforts to stop and detain anyone deemed suspicious. To expand its reach, ICE greatly lowered its recruitment standards, effectively enlisting anyone who cares to sign up. To attract new officers, ICE advertises the chance to do violence to people deemed “enemies” of the United States, likening civil immigration enforcement to a war on a dangerous, alien force. The result is an agency whose agents’ first recourse appears to be violence or the threat of violence.
They are executing American citizens. On January 7, 2026 an ICE agent in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a mother of 3, by shooting her in the face as she tried to drive away. Then the killer walked away, and our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened. Decent politicians condemned the murder. And what did our junior senator from Arkansas have to say? Tom Cotton immediately tried to turn it into a partisan talking point and tried to gaslight us with "leftist attacks". He thinks we're so stupid and easily manipulated that we won't believe our own eyes.
They are executing American citizens: Part 2. On January 24, 2026 ICE agents in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a 37 year old ICU nurse, who was filming their activity and trying to help others. Then our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened.

If ICE can murder innocent U.S. citizens without repercussions, what could they do to you? ICE is out of control and a danger to us all - no one is safe. What's Tom Cotton going to do about it? Cheer them on and lie to cover up their abuses. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton has no morals and no decency.

Voting for an Unnecessary and Unpopular War in Iran

War destroys human lives, families and innocent people, causes economic ruin, and triggers immense suffering. War should always be the option of last resort.

In order to distract from the Epstein Files, Donald Trump started an illegal war of choice with Iran, and now:

American soldiers are dead and Americans have been abandoned in other countries
We executed a double-tap strike against a girls school in Iran, killing 100 little girls and then their rescuers and parents
Gas prices have gone up
Multiple other countries are under attack
There is threat of attacks on American soil
They have floated the idea of a draft
The war is costing us $1 billion a day
We are being dog-walked by Israel, who has been trying to convince presidents to attack Iran forever, and finally found one dumb enough to do so

No one wants this war. But Tom Cotton supports this madness and voted against the War Powers Resolution that would have stopped it. Does Tom Cotton work for Israel or the people of Arkansas? We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton is actively making our lives worse.

Missing in Action

Good leaders meet with their constituents and have town halls where citizens can voice concerns, ask questions, and provide input on policies.

Tom Cotton doesn't care what we think. He only cares what his real constituents, his big money donors, think.

Tom Cotton rarely shows his face in Arkansas and hasn't had a town hall in 9 years because he doesn't care what we think. We deserve better.

starvoters pov: Tom Cotton, the Loch Ness Monster, and Bigfoot walked in to a bar...

starvoters pov

Real talk, Arkansas: WTF are we doing even considering Tom Cotton for another term? He is actively working against us on every issue that could make our lives better. Our cost of living is up, our access to healthcare is down, our farmers are being destroyed, the rich are getting tax cuts that are being paid for with our Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP and Social Security, our environment is being plundered, food programs for our poor are being cut, and our jobs have been destroyed. He lies to us and gaslights us, is owned and works for billionaires and big business and out-of-staters, opposes common-sense gun safety laws that will protect our kids, wants the government to control what we can do with our own bodies, wants to take away our voting power, and is chomping at the bit to use U.S. troops and law enforcement against us, his fellow Americans.

Do we really want another 6 YEARS of this?

There are candidates who want to make our lives better. For your sake, for your kids sake, for your family, friends, neighbors and fellow Arkansans sake, please vote for one of them. Don't let billionaire-manufactured culture wars and other BS distract you from what really matters. Because we all deserve a better life.

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Running Against:

Hallie Shoffner

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