Some musings about the election results.
Three weeks ago I wrote about a potential protest vote in the race between Tate Reeves and Brandon Presley. I concluded, “But most predict the results this year will be similar to the results four years ago when Reeves beat Jim Hood 51.9% to 46.8%.”
Almost complete unofficial returns late Thursday showed Reeves won with 51.5% to Brandon Presley’s 47.1%. Those mosts were pretty darn accurate.
But so, apparently, was the prediction about a 5% to 10% protest vote.
The average vote total for major Republican office holders Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, Attorney General Lynn Fitch, and Secretary of State Michael Watson was 469,323. The total vote for Reeves was 408,680. The gap between those two numbers was 60,643 or 7.6% of the total gubernatorial vote.
The protest vote was there. It just wasn’t enough to affect the outcome.
Some questioned Reeves’ campaign strategy to run hard against President Joe Biden and “liberal Democrats” rather focus on Presley and state issues. It appears that strategy effectively trapped Presley. First, Presley he hired national Democratic operatives to help manage his campaign. Later, he had to depend on big money from national Democrats to compete with Reeves. Reeves jumped hard on those ties and engendered legitimate concerns about how beholden to those interests a Presley administration might be.
On the other side, Presley’s attempt to link Reeves to the TANF scandal just did not resonate with voters. There was little hard evidence to support his claim. And it detracted from Presley’s most impactful issue – Medicaid expansion.
President Donald Trump’s last minute endorsement of Reeves was the icing Reeves needed to finish his victory cake.
In 2019, prognosticators said Hood’s home region of northeast Mississippi would have to come through big for him. The same was said for Presley. In neither race did that happen.
State maps showed in red the counties won by Reeves in 2019 and 2023. Red dominated northeast Mississippi on both.
Presley’s loss will leave Mississippi with no white Democrat holding a major regional or statewide office in Mississippi for the first time in modern history.
In fact, only three such offices will be held by Democrats, all of whom are black – Second District U.S. Congressman Bennie Thompson, Central District Highway Commissioner Willie Simmons, and newly elected Central District Public Service Commissioner De’Keither Stamps, if he holds on to his tiny margin. (Judges are nonpartisan.)
Stamps led incumbent Brent Bailey 50.5% to 49.5% with votes still uncounted. That’s a flip from four years ago when Bailey beat Stamps 50.4% to 49.6%.
Crawford is a syndicated columnist from Jackson.