Jim Hood is either a relic or a lesson.
For well over a decade, the Mississippi attorney general has been the only Democrat to hold office statewide. After four terms as the state’s top cop, the 57-year-old from Chickasaw County is running a competitive campaign for governor against Republican Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves, whose own rise in Republican politics has mirrored Hood on the right. A recent Mason-Dixon poll and another internal one released by the Hood campaign earlier this month found the two in a statistical tie.
Hood’s long-standing conservatism on issues like abortion—he said as recently as May that he would have signed the state’s new “heartbeat abortion law”—have earned him a reputation as one of the most conservative elected Democrats in the country as the national party has lurched to the left. But in his bid for governor, Hood is emphasizing his populist bent on economics. “I’ll be fighting for working folks all across Mississippi,” Hood says in one campaign video, the entirety of which is spent in his pickup truck.
And while Hood faces numerous obstacles to the governor’s mansion that make his election the most unlikely out of the three Southern-state gubernatorial races the Democrats will contest on November 5 (the others are in Kentucky and Louisiana), the Hood campaign—and its somewhat surprising viability in a state long written off by the national party—represents either the last gasps of the old Democratic machine, a path forward for Democrats to win back the Deep South, or a little of both.
THE RISE OF JIM HOOD in Mississippi politics, as the rest of his party has essentially fallen apart, can be at least partially explained by the cases in which the attorney general has made a name for himself.
Hood’s defining characteristic, aside from his Gemstone-like hair, is that he’s a prosecutor. After serving as a special assistant attorney general in the state’s drug asset forfeiture unit—in 1998, he lamented a Mississippi Supreme Court ruling reshaping forfeiture rules, saying it “will make it much tougher to take property in drug crimes”—Hood was elected in 1995 as the district attorney for eight counties in the northeastern part of the state, including his home county of Chickasaw. Hood closely adhered to the tough-on-crime playbook of the 1990s; during his first year in office, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Clarion-Ledger praising state legislators for passing tougher criminal justice legislation.
In 2003, Hood was elected attorney general to succeed Democrat Mike Moore, Hood’s former boss when he served as special assistant attorney general. Moore’s willingness to take on big industry during his four terms would foreshadow Hood’s, as he would become nationally recognized for his leading role in the fight against Big Tobacco, which resulted in the historic $246 billion settlement between the nation’s four largest cigarette makers and most U.S. states and territories. (Moore retired from public office after 2003, but more recently has played a major role in litigation against opioid manufacturers and distributors.)
The year before Hood was elected, Democrats controlled most of the state’s executive offices, including the governor’s mansion. By the time Hood started his second term in 2008, however, he was the only Democrat left, which earned him the distinction of the “Last Democrat in Dixie” in a 2013 Governing profile. The “only disadvantage to being the sole Democrat in the state,” Hood told Governing at the time, was that “nobody is going to take up for you, even if they think you’re right.” (Hood declined to be interviewed for this story.)
In the attorney general’s office, Hood quickly became known for his aggressive prosecution of price-gouging following Hurricane Katrina, which killed 238 people and did billions worth of damage to the state. In the immediate aftermath, Hood set up emergency offices in the most heavily affected counties to take complaints on price-gouging, as well as other disaster-related issues such as identity theft and home repair fraud.
Hood’s campaign represents either the last gasps of the old Democratic machine, a path forward for Democrats to win back the Deep South, or a little of both.
The next year, Hood sued five insurance companies—including State Farm and Allstate—alleging that adjusters tricked homeowners into saying damage to their home was caused by flood damage, which wasn’t covered under homeowners’ insurance, rather than wind damage, which was. (Hood’s legal battles against State Farm have been a consistent feature of his tenure as AG.)
One of the most heavily affected counties was Harrison, on the Gulf Coast. “The way Jim helped us—I’m sure there’s things I still don’t even know about,” state Senator Deborah Dawkins, a Democrat who has represented the area since 2000, tells the Prospect. “It was like he was our own personal lawyer, and thank goodness because I don’t know what we would have done otherwise.”
That same year, Hood, along with Neshoba County district attorney Mark Duncan, successfully prosecuted Edgar Ray Killen for manslaughter in the murders of CORE activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964. Killen spent the rest of his life in prison, where he died in 2018.
Hood’s tenure has also been marked by frequent spats with tech giants like Google and Facebook over issues like student privacy, internet piracy (with the backing of big entertainment associations), and most recently, antitrust concerns. And like other AGs around the country, Hood has taken an aggressive role in combating the opioid crisis, suing drug distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal, and McKesson last year in Hinds County court.
“His reputation overall is that he’s not afraid to shy away from challenges, willing to take on complex issues like the opioid crisis, or not afraid to file suits against big businesses,” Ole Miss political science professor Conor Dowling says.
To criminal justice reformers, Hood’s record is lackluster at best. Since 2004, Mississippi has executed 15 prisoners on death row, before lawsuits over Mississippi’s lethal-injection drugs put a (possibly temporary) end to the practice in 2012. That hasn’t stopped Hood. In 2016, he led a charge to allow firing squads, electrocutions, and nitrogen gas as alternative methods to kill death row prisoners. Hood has even gone as far as to challenge the competency of pro bono attorneys working on death penalty appeals.
But Hood’s regressive positions on the death penalty don’t seem to have done much to thwart Mississippi voters’ opinion of him. Hood received 60 percent of the vote or more in each of his first three elections as attorney general, and although his 2015 re-election was the closest call he’s had, he still won with 55 percent of the vote. It remains to be seen, however, whether he can replicate that with his name at the top of the ticket.
“He’s run as a Democrat for all of his elections, but in a lot of ways he’s not a liberal Democrat,” Dowling says. “Which is consistent with a lot of Democrats in Mississippi.”
AS A CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR, Hood shares a lot of characteristics with other Democrats who’ve recently been successful in conservative-leaning states. Like North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Hood preceded his run with four terms as attorney general. Like Kansas’s Laura Kelly, Hood’s platform has a focus on education and expanding Medicaid, which would cover an estimated 116,000 currently uninsured people in Mississippi. And like John Bel Edwards in the neighboring state of Louisiana, Hood is much more right-wing than the national party on abortion.
Earlier this year, both Mississippi and Louisiana were part of a group of states which passed laws, in direct confrontation with Roe v. Wade, to ban abortion at six weeks. Edwards, who is running a tight re-election race this year against Baton Rouge businessman Eddie Rispone, signed the Louisiana bill into law. Mississippi’s current Republican governor, Phil Bryant, did as well, and after prodding from the Clarion-Ledger, Hood said he would’ve done the same, although he maintained that conservatives are using abortion as a wedge to “trick good, church-going folks into believing they or a party can do something about this issue.”
Mississippi’s law was almost immediately struck down by the Fifth Circuit, but Hood is fighting it on appeal. Reproductive-rights advocates say that’s par for the course with Hood, who’s been defending Mississippi’s abortion restrictions in court since the year he took office. “I’ve been with Planned Parenthood for 13 years and there’s never been a time, to my recollection, that he has given any indication of support,” Felicia Brown-Williams, Planned Parenthood’s Mississippi state director, tells the Prospect.
“Both Hood and Reeves are anti-choice and have both explicitly said so over the years,” Brown-Williams says. “So when it comes to policy to that end, I’m not seeing and don’t anticipate any differences between the two of them.”
Dawkins, who partially blamed her recent upset in the Democratic primary on her vocal support of reproductive rights over the past few years—she reportedly voted “Hell no” on the six-week abortion bill in February—says that she supports Hood even though she’s “not in lockstep” with him on every issue.
“It’s not his thing, he’s got a wife and a daughter and he does like women, but I don’t think he’s had the life experiences that I’ve had, so I can’t expect him to understand those,” Dawkins says of Hood’s stance on abortion. “But hopefully he’ll have his ears open, or at least one ear open. He is a big supporter of the law and the Constitution, so I have hopes in that regard for sure.”
For national Democrats, a Hood victory would be a shot of adrenaline heading into a bruising presidential campaign. For Mississippi Democrats, however, Hood’s challenge this year is everything.
At this point, it’s become conventional wisdom that the only kind of Democrat who can win a statewide election in the Deep South is one who’s at best ambivalent on abortion, and at worst outright anti-choice. But it’s worth noting that in Georgia—admittedly a significantly less Republican-leaning state than Mississippi or Louisiana—Stacey Abrams very nearly won election last year with the endorsement of Planned Parenthood and on a promise to protect reproductive rights. And earlier this year, both Cooper and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam vetoed “born-alive” abortion bills that purported to fix a problem that simply doesn’t exist.
(Hood’s record on LGBT rights is more mixed; while he’s previously defended a state law banning adoption by same-sex couples, he declined to join a lawsuit against the Obama administration on its directive to schools on transgender students.)
As part of a nationwide survey released earlier this year, the Public Religion Research Institute found that 41 percent of Mississippi residents believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases. “In our conversations with Mississippians and with people out in the world, Mississippians have a much different view than some of our politicians. Mississippians believe we should be leaving decisions to families,” Brown-Williams says. “The folks who vote in the primaries is a smaller subset of people than the general populace, so the person who comes out of the primary election is not always the one who reflects the full experience and full complexity of the way people who live in our state feel on issues.”
Dawkins seems to disagree. “Sometimes, down here, you just gotta get real,” she says. “I would never go out on the campaign trail and say that I was promoting abortion for everyone who wants one.”
WHILE HOOD’S CAREER as attorney general has perhaps been defined by being out of step with the national party, however, his campaign for governor has been much more conventionally liberal in scope. Both Medicaid expansion and Hood’s education plan—which includes statewide pre-kindergarten, combating the state’s shortage of teachers and raising their pitifully low salaries, as well as “fully funding public education” in a state which consistently ranks among the nation’s worst in public-school systems—have been a major focus of Hood’s campaign against Reeves, who is coming off two terms as lieutenant governor. In September, Hood’s education plan earned him the endorsement of the Mississippi Association of Educators.
“It’s a consistent thing for them to focus on helping Mississippi public education,” Dowling says. “Whether it can play enough, I’m not sure in the end if those specific issues are going to be the ones to move the people on the fence.”
Although the Deep South has been reliably Republican in presidential elections for decades, there’s reason to believe that Hood has a good chance. The win of fellow prosecutor Doug Jones in Alabama in 2017, as well as a surprisingly close challenge by former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy in last year’s Mississippi Senate race, showed visible cracks in the GOP’s southern firewall. (Espy is running again in 2020, in a rematch against Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith.)
But unlike Espy, Hood’s hurdles to the governor’s mansion aren’t just political in nature. Mississippi’s electoral system, which dates back to Jim Crow, requires a candidate to win both a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the state House districts in order to win the election; if neither candidate wins both, it’ll be thrown to the overwhelmingly Republican legislature to decide the winner.
The only time in recent memory this has happened was 1999, although Democrat Ronnie Musgrove won the popular vote before the Democratic-majority legislature put him in office. A lawsuit currently making its way through the courts is challenging the century-plus–old system, claiming that “an African-American-preferred candidate must obtain at least 55 percent of the popular vote to do the same.”
“I think it’ll certainly generate discussion about whether a change should be made, regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit,” Dowling says. “It’s the only state that has a law on the books such as this.”
“It’d just be such an outrage,” Dawkins says of the potential for Hood to win the popular vote but lose the election. “But the fact that you have so much time between the election [and the inauguration], you could work the media like a son of a bitch between November and the second week of January … I think Jim could win. This is one of those things where every vote counts.”
For national Democrats, a Hood victory would be a shot of adrenaline heading into what’s already shaping up to be a bruising presidential campaign. For Mississippi Democrats, however, Hood’s challenge this year is everything. If Hood loses, the entire party would likely be shut out of statewide office for the first time since Reconstruction. And from there lies the existential question to Mississippi Democrats, which will come eventually, whether it’s next month or eight years from now—whether they should keep pushing socially conservative Democrats in a bid to win over religious independents, go in a more progressive direction such as the one laid out by Jackson mayor Chokwe Lumumba, or try to strike a balance between the two. Hood’s own campaign seems to suggest the third option is most likely.
“I know there are some people who are younger than me who are trying to rebuild the party, but it takes money, and there’s a finite amount of that around. It would take a real concerted effort to get things rolling again,” Dawkins says.
“Hopefully Jim wins a landslide and we don’t have to worry about it so much,” she added. “But if he doesn’t win, it’ll be hard for them to get anything started again.”
