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%.
“It is good for people to eat, drink, and enjoy their work under the sun during the short life God has given them, and to accept their lot in life” – Ecclesiastes 5:18.
Crawford is a syndicated columnist from Jackson.
Copyright 2023 by Bill Crawford
21 comments:
Yo Crawford, you need to work on your grammar.
Sadly, Tate lacks the humility to ask himself why he lost support.
Quite a few women were appalled by the lack of compassion in the abortion issue...by no real effort by our legislature to educate themselves on the medical realities or the social and financial ones women can face.
Quite a few Republicans who live and prosper in our Capitol were appalled that he forgot we had supported him financially and with our votes and that it wasn't just black people and democrats he was hurting with his unwillingness to do anything but find blame.
And,a lot of us are just weary with the hateful, snarky, preening, self-centered screaming me me politicians that are too lazy to think and find solutions. Tate proved himself a " No Nothing"(or next to nothing) who thinks he knows everything.
And, if he paid a trainer a dime, he's a fool just looking at the lack of results!
There was no trainer. That was a smear job by the Presley campaign. The Governor way back when went to the Paul Lacoste boot camps when he had them in Flowood. Probably 60-70 people attended the boot camps at a time. Many of them politicians and yes, people in the media. That was Lacoste's role as a trainer. The $1.3 million was distributed by DHS when Bryant was Governor. Reeves was Lieutenant Governor. They were slick ads, well produced, and hard hitting, but weren't true. Reeves campaign didn't hit back at them.
I wonder where the current racial demographic of the state workers under current commissioner Brent Bailey stands?
Anyone want to make a wager on the future racial make up of that same workforce under Stamps?
Good post, KF
Wow. That's pretty racist. Any reason in his background why you might say that? He won with Democrat and Republican votes - and he knows it.
White guy in Clinton. I voted for Stamps. Solid guy. Veteran. Good morale character. I doubt we line up philosophically down the line, but I’ll take Stamps over a bought and paid for republican all day.
I guess Tate Reeves' next ambition is Cindy Hyde Smith's Senate seat in 2026.
Meet the new boss same as the old boss. Four years from now Delbert will be elected governor and on and on. We the people keep electing the same type politicians then complain that nothing meaningful happens.
1:18 PM Cindy is unbeatable. She will hold the seat as long as Diane Feinstein.
No doubt Tater going after Cindy’s seat. And, despite my dislike for Tater, he’s a helluva lot better choice than Cindy. Get along home Cindy.
6:54
I’m also plugged in , I just don’t see her being that strong . Every time I run in to her she acts like she wants to come home .
King - Tate was the go-between for Davis and Lacoste.
9:23, she had a great life in Brookhaven and being Ag Commissioner. In DC, she's in Purgatory. Welcome home, Senator Cindy!
2:42 PM is correct. Just look at Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore and Jackson’s history of how many decades in a row they’ve voted Democrat – look at the horrific results – and wonder why they keep doing it. It’s a Democrat third world type dictatorship right here in the USA.
Even the horrific murders of children and innocent little kids killed via stray bullets creates no change at all. Of course the elite white Democrats and their co-partner media propagandists give their wink, via silence, to the Chokwe’s that run these cities…saying hey, we won’t criticize you, we will even make excuses for you, you just gotta vote for our rich white asses come November.
Of course many, if not most of these elite rich white Democrats won’t even live in the Democrat high crime cities that their party controls (shameful hypocrisy). No, they run their hypocrite asses off to gated areas, many in Republican controlled districts. It’s real easy to not care about the horrific crime in your party’s city, when you ain’t living there.
Crawford: “The protest vote was there. It just wasn’t enough to affect the outcome.”
Translation: the manufactured crises like the state flag issue that I helped create did make a percentage of low IQ rednecks (just dumb enough to take the bait and vote against their best interest) mad enough to “protest,’ but it wasn’t enough.
The state flag and the Israel/Hamas war…with low IQ rednecks and likewise BLMers on the same team. Funny stuff.
November 12, 2023 at 11:10 PM, proof??
I didn't vote for either one.
Tate didn't deserve a vote after the way he tried to walk the line between the crying scared population the drank the propaganda koolaid, and the extremely pissed population in regard to his many covid mandates.
The fact he felt he could use the authority of the governors office to try to dictate the health choices of citizens was/is unforgivable.
The closing of state lakes and state parks was another issue.
Parroting Thomas Dobbs garbage as another.
No good he did in office erased the man we saw during covid.
He showed himself as a weak leader and pandered in whichever direction he could to try to assure himself he could get re-elected.
He was too scared to piss off half the potential voters.
Presley, as a democrat, would have been even worse with adhering to the covid propaganda.
9:43 Tate and Dobbs did an excellent job at that time with the information we had on a novel virus. They communicated daily. Unlike TRUMP who wanted to keep the virus a secret. Mississippi opened and recovered better than most states.
Having said that, I do not like Tate's elitist and narrow perspective on most issues, and I did not vote for him.
"Anyone want to make a wager on the future racial make up of that same workforce under Stamps?"
11:20 - What workforce exists at the behest of a Public Service Commissioner?
“I do not like Tate's elitist and narrow perspective”, yeah, when I see Tate Reeves, the first thing I think, there's an elitist, not. Dude, you are piss poor at trolling.
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