LITTLE ROCK—Arkansas remains the only state from the former Confederacy never to elect an African-American to Congress or any statewide office—and last week it soundly rejected the man set to become the nation’s first black president.

Barack Obama lost by 20 percentage points, even though fellow Democrats control all of Arkansas’ statewide offices, both chambers of the Legislature and three of its four congressional districts.

Many blacks say race is the reason, and consider the poor showing to be another frustrating chapter in Arkansas’ long and tortured civil-rights history.

“To vote for an African-American at a statewide level would show we’re willing to move forward. We have an obligation to continue to belie that piece of history that is indelibly in people’s brains,” said Joyce Elliott, a Democrat unopposed last week in a state Senate race in Little Rock.

Elliott, who is black, said she would someday like to run for statewide or congressional office but is not encouraged by the state’s history.

“It’s important for all of the state to say this is something we want to do. This is an opportunity gap we need to fill,” she said.

Obama’s losing Arkansas was not unexpected. He made no trips to a state that had gone Republican in every presidential election since 1980 except when its former governor Bill Clinton was running for the White House.

Since Obama did not campaign here the way he did in the Southern states he won—Florida, Virginia and North Carolina—it’s hard to predict how future black candidates might fare in Arkansas, said Jay Barth, a political scientist at Hendrix College in Conway.

“There really wasn’t a dialogue about his candidacy in the state,” Barth said. “In the absence of that conversation, it allowed certain stereotypes and assumptions about Obama to really lock in in the eyes of the Arkansas electorate.”

Exit polls conducted with Arkansas voters last week showed that 68 percent of white voters went for Republican John McCain, with 30 percent voting for Obama. In 2004, President Bush carried 63 percent of the white vote, compared to 36 percent for Democrat John Kerry. Among white women in 2004, 60 percent voted for Bush; this year 68 percent went for McCain.

Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana are the only states where President-elect Obama fared worse among white voters than Kerry did in his 2004 loss.

“It says to me that race is still a predominant issue in those states and that it was race that was the explanation” for Obama’s loss in those states, said David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.

One reason no blacks have been elected to Congress in Arkansas is demographics: Unlike many Southern states, it has no predominantly black congressional districts. In a state of less than 3 million people, about 16 percent of them black, it would be difficult to draw up such a district.

For statewide offices, meanwhile, it took until 2002 for Democrats to even nominate a black candidate. Ron Sheffield, a lawyer in his first political run, lost in lieutenant governor’s race that year to billionaire GOP incumbent Win Rockefeller.

Sheffield said he wanted to show other minority candidates what was possible.