Everything You Need To Know About The Mississippi Senate Runoff
Thought you were done with election season? Not so fast. On Tuesday in Mississippi, the final U.S. senator of the 116th Congress will be chosen, determining whether Republicans have 52 or 53 seats come January. It’s the second round of voting in the special election that was scheduled after Republican Sen. Thad Cochran resigned in April. We’re not forecasting this runoff, but nonpartisan handicappers rate the Republican as the favorite. Catch up on everything you need to know about the election below, then join us back here on Tuesday night for our live blog.
1. The players
Although the special election is nominally nonpartisan,1 the battle lines are clear. The Republican candidate is incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, the former state agriculture and commerce commissioner who was appointed to Cochran’s seat in March. The Democratic candidate is Mike Espy, former President Bill Clinton’s secretary of agriculture and a former six-year congressman from Mississippi.
National Republicans have mobilized on behalf of Hyde-Smith in recent weeks, though it’s not clear if they are genuinely concerned or simply taking no chances. President Trump is hosting not one, but two rallies for her on Monday, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Senate Leadership Fund are reportedly spending more than $1 million each on ads. Democrats have responded in kind, if not proportionally: Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have stumped for Espy, and the liberal Senate Majority PAC has made a $500,000 TV buy.
But both candidates have baggage. Republicans have focused their ads on Espy’s 1997 indictment for accepting improper gifts when he worked in the Clinton administration (although he was acquitted on all counts in 1998) and his more recent lobbying work for a dictator accused of crimes against humanity. And Hyde-Smith has come under fire for a series of controversies, mostly about her relationship with Mississippi’s Confederate and Jim Crow past. Most notably, she praised a close supporter by saying, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Many saw racial undertones to the quip given that Espy is black and that Mississippi has a long history of lynchings. As a result, corporations like Walmart and Major League Baseball have asked for refunds of their donations to Hyde-Smith’s campaign, but it is far from certain how much the controversies will matter to Hyde-Smith’s (mostly white) Mississippi base.
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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-mississippi-senate-runoff/
