With Jeff Landry breaking the 50% threshold needed to be elected governor of Louisiana in their primary, Mississippi is one of only two states electing a governor next month. First term governor Tate Reeves, being dogged by a wide ranging Welfare scandal, is facing tougher than expected competition from Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley, a second cousin of Elvis. This race has gotten a good deal of attention, but does that mean there is an upset brewing in the Magnolia state? 

Presley, a former mayor from Nettleton, represents the northern district on the Public Service Commission. His district includes much of the first and part of the second congressional districts, represented by Republican Trent Kelly and Democrat Bennie Thompson respectively. A consistent overperformer, this will be his first statewide election. Four years ago, the longtime Attorney General Jim Hood was only able to manage 46.8% against the then Lt. Governor Reeves. The year before that, Mike Espy, the former congressman from the second district and the first African American to be Secretary of Agriculture, was able to force Cindy Hyde-Smith into a runoff before falling by seven in the Senate special election. Below is a map of the best Democratic performance in these two races. Will Presley be able to match or outdo these margins across the state against an incumbent governor which he'll likely need to do for a chance to win? Well, he’s got a lot of things working against him, and making things harder Mississippi, like Louisiana and many states in the deep south, requires a majority of votes cast to win an election. If no one receives a majority, the top two candidates will go to a runoff.

Put bluntly, this is not a state well-suited to the modern Democratic party.  It is highly racially polarized, meaning White voters overwhelmingly back Republicans while Black voters overwhelmingly back Democrats..Take for example, Tishomingo county, in the northeast most corner of the state, has a White population of 91%, and in 2020 voted by a margin of 75% for President Trump. In the southwest, just south of the Mississippi Delta, Claiborne county has an African American population of 87%, and voted for President Biden by a margin of 71%. It is also highly inelastic, meaning it doesn’t bounce around much from election to election with the national mood. According to FiveThirtyEight’s elasticity scores, Mississippi ranked as the second least elastic of the fifty states and D.C. in 2020 and the third least elastic in 2018. Keep this in mind when considering a Democrat has not been elected governor of Mississippi, which President Trump carried by sixteen in 2020, since Ronnie Musgrove received just shy of 50% in 1999. 

The problems these present Democrats in the state are best illustrated when looking at the 2018 Senate special election and the 2019 governor’s race in the maps below. Both Espy and Hood massively overperformed, but their overperformance wasn’t uniform. Both maps look pretty similar at a glance. There were only three counties that flipped between the two races. With Hood carrying Lafayette, home to Ole Miss, and Madison while Espy picked up Lowndes, home to an Air Force base and part of the “Golden Triangle.”  

When looking at a map of which candidate had better margins in each county the story becomes more clear. Espy sees most of his overperformance in the northwest and western portion of the state in the Mississippi Delta, where about a third of Mississippi’s African American population resides. Hood primarily performed better in the central portion of the state, as well as in southeast and southwest Mississippi. Even here it’s easy to notice that the scale of overperformance is under 5% in most counties across the state. To have a chance, Brandon Presley will have to thread a tiny needle. He’ll need to match or exceed both Hood’s 2019 margins with White voters and Espy’s 2018 margins with Black voters. No one has been able to put both pieces of the puzzle together yet in the modern era.

So why is this even being discussed? Tate Reeves is a particularly scandal plagued governor and is not a particularly good candidate. Usually incumbency would confer certain advantages, fundraising prowess, high name recognition, etc., that translates to an electoral advantage, all things being equal, but the Welfare scandal ensnaring everyone from the current and former governors to Brett Favre could negate that. The evergrowing scandal stems from the misspending of at least $77 million in federal funds and Reeves firing the attorney investigating the matter. The scandal is extremely unwelcome to Reeves having only won in his initial bid for the governor’s mansion with just shy of 52%, avoiding a runoff. Phil Bryant, who Reeves served under, won his races with 60% and 69%.

Brandon Presley has also made this interesting. Though he’s never been tested statewide, he is anything but an electoral slouch. He has outrun the partisan makeup of his district in a big way each time he’s been up for election. The conservative Democrat has staked out populist positions on expanding Medicaid and raising the minimum wage.  He has also taken positions at odds with the Democratic party and the prevailing winds, such as abortion, but that is likelier than not going to help him in a bible belt state like Mississippi. More than anything he has shown an ability to fundraise. Presley has broken a Mississippi record for most money raised by a Democrat in the state with $7.9 million this year beating out former Governor Musgrove’s $7.7 million in his race twenty years ago. Though Reeves has much more money on hand, the two candidates have spent nearly identical sums this year ($6.9 million for Reeves and $6.8 Million for Presley.) Presley has used his campaign cash to hammer Reeves for months over the Welfare scandal and the Governor’s refusal to expand Medicaid.

It is a testament to the quality of both candidates that the Mississippi governor’s race is a question at all.  If Tate Reeves didn’t have the albatros of the Welfare scandal around his neck and if Brandon Presley wasn’t a good candidate it would be all over but the shouting. It is expected to see Presley well exceeding Joe Biden’s margins in the northern and northeastern counties that have been long familiar with him as their Public Services Commissioner, but if he does similarly well in the southern Mississippi, where his name identification is lower, he might be able to force a runoff.  If he is somehow able to carry momentum over to the Mississippi Delta he might just have enough to pull off a miracle. As stated at the beginning, there is reason to be skeptical. Pivot Point has this race rated as Likely Republican.