The behavior of the two sides in the race for US Senate in Mississippi makes me highly curious about what their internal polls show. Trump has had a rally in the state, as has Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, and Pete Buttigieg have visited to campaign for Democrat Scott Colom. Republicans reportedly have pulled their spending in Georgia and North Carolina, conceding defeat in those Senate races in order to invest some of the savings in Mississippi. Is it close?
I said I’d be curious about the internal polls of the two sides because, as far as I can tell, there are no reliable public ones. In the New York Times’s compilation of Senate polls that are at all recent, the only ones for Mississippi are by a firm, Change Research, that’s “affiliated” with the Colom campaign. Their poll showed the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, a mostly mute dim bulb, ahead by 6 points in August, and by just 3 points in a poll published last week. As someone who has contributed modest sums to Democratic campaigns, I can report that I receive 10 gazillion solicitations in seasons such as the one we are now in, and in around a third of them the pitch includes the message WE ARE BEHIND IN THE POLLS BUT ONLY BY A LITTLE! (LIke, by 2 or 3 points.)
I have been accustomed to think of Mississippi as the prototypical lost cause for Democrats, but, educating myself today, maybe I was exaggerating the deficit. The above county map for the result of the 2024 presidential election in the state isn’t what the corresponding one looks like in, say, Kansas or Idaho or Iowa or South Dakota or Tennessee or . . . the beat goes on, broad red paint brushes, all. Granted, it’s a map that yielded a 23-point Trump win in Mississippi, but at least the Democrats have something to start with–namely, African-Americans, who are essentially 40 per cent of the state’s population. And it’s not as if the chain of blue counties along or near the east bank of the River, where the state’s African Americans have congregated, are all sparsely populated: Hinds County, the biggest in the state, home to the city of Jackson, went for Harris by 3-to-1. The county is 70 per cent African American.
Harris, however, got only 16 percent of the white vote in Mississippi, compared to the 40 percent she got from white voters across the country. It’s been said, perhaps as a kind of witticism though it’s at least approximately true, that Mississippi would be blue as California if its white voters behaved as they do in the country as a whole. (The rough math of the calculation: nine-tenths of two-fifths is 0.36, and two-fifths of three-fifths is 0.24, which would sum to 0.6, 60 percent, for the Democrats.)
Some of the recent statewide elections in Mississippi have been somewhat close. Hyde-Smith won a 7-point special election in 2018 to take her place in the Senate. Two years later, with Trump on the ballot, she won by 10 points against the same Democratic opponent, Mike Espy. The Republican governor, Tate Reeves, another dim bulb, was re-elected in 2023 by 50 to 47 percent. Could Colom get over the top? He’s an energetic campaigner and an accomplished state prosecutor with a weak opponent and favorable political weather. He’s also a black guy who needs the vote of maybe a quarter of white Mississippians. Both Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball have shifted their characterization of the race from Solid Republican to Likely Republican. As I said above, both sides are acting as if it’s closer than that. Whatever happens, we’ll always have the Colom campaign to thank for what I have to believe is the best political ad of the season. If you want, consider all the foregoing as a mere excuse for highlighting this:
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