Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
Mike Espy speaks to reporters in Jackson, Mississippi, prior to winning the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, March 2020.
In an election year convulsing with racial reckonings, you’d think a Senate rematch between an African American man and a white woman would generate interest. But the contest between Democrat Mike Espy and Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi barely registers outside the Deep South, despite recent polling showing Espy within five percentage points of Hyde-Smith.
Espy, the first African American from Mississippi to serve in Congress since Reconstruction, argues that the national Democratic Party’s lack of interest in his campaign is symptomatic of a deeper failure to understand how Mississippi’s shifting demographics give him a legitimate shot at a red-state Senate seat.
“The DNC says they want minorities to run for office but when they actually do, we don’t get the support that we need and deserve,” Espy tells The American Prospect. “Where else in America is there an African American population of 40 percent? Where is it?”
In 2018, Sen. Thad Cochran resigned due to illness, setting up the contest between Espy, a Madison County attorney but also a former member of Congress (1987–1993) and Bill Clinton’s first secretary of agriculture, and Hyde-Smith, a state commissioner of agriculture and commerce. Bolstered by a President Trump rally, Hyde-Smith won a runoff election 53.6 percent to Espy’s 46.4 percent. A mid-October surge of small-dollar donations for Espy after Hyde-Smith’s “public hanging, I’d be on the front row” comment came too late to make a difference. Espy outraised Hyde-Smith in 2018; but in 2020 he is behind, $1.3 million to her $2 million.
Today, with Espy close on her heels, some Mississippi Democrats still consider Hyde-Smith to be a weak, gaffe-prone candidate in a state trying to shed its image of racial hostility and dubious about the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19. So far, she has kept the lowest of low profiles and has shunned debates. Her silence stands out in a tumultuous summer when state lawmakers finally voted, after decades of fierce resistance, to get rid of their Confederate state flag during the George Floyd protests.
“She is weaker than Lindsey Graham in South Carolina; she has not been there as long and not delivered as much,” says Pamela Shaw, president of P3 Strategies, a Jackson-based government relations, campaign management, and consulting firm, who has not worked on Espy’s Senate campaigns. “There is a way to wedge that [so Espy can win] with additional resources.”
What resources? “Money and people,” she says.
For Espy to prevail, he has to gin up historic enthusiasm, beginning with his African American base—he received 96 percent of the Black vote in 2018—and then some. In 2020, that translates into generating record turnout from Black voters and increasing his 2018 vote share from about 18 percent of the white vote in 2018 to 22 percent this year.
An August Poor People’s Campaign report, “Unleashing the Power of Poor and Low-Income Americans,” found that Mississippi is one of seven states where nonvoting low-income groups add up to roughly one in five of all eligible voters. The Espy campaign has identified about 100,000 people statewide who have not voted for anyone since Barack Obama in 2008.
“We know who they are,” he says.
Connecting with a critical mass of them requires getting outside the COVID comfort zone. Shaw says that Espy can’t rely on a digital campaign in a rural state where people expect a candidate to show up and ask for votes. Faith leaders can help get people, especially seniors, to the polls, she says, but there are also “pulse points” where people still congregate that are important to canvass. In addition to places like grocery and convenience stores, the economic downturn has also introduced new places for candidates and surrogates to meet voters: food bank giveaways.
Though the rural state still commands a front-porch approach even during a pandemic, increasingly candidates like Espy harness the same strategies that most Democratic candidates for statewide office do: They appeal to college-educated whites in college towns and suburbs. In Mississippi, that means the larger cities like Jackson, the state capital, and its suburbs; Gulfport, Hattiesburg, as well as fast-growing cities like Tupelo. DeSoto County, which includes the Mississippi suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee, has more potential Espy voters than the rural Delta region where many poor, older Black voters live. College towns like Oxford, home to the flagship campus of the University of Mississippi, and Starkville, home to Mississippi State University, are also crucial areas for him.
Despite Espy’s close finish in 2018 (the best showing for a Democratic Senate contender since 1982) and current polling, party officials are fixated on other contests.
Unlike the issues of race or reproductive rights that may appeal to voters in suburbs and cities, the economy and jobs provide an entrée with college-educated whites in small towns and rural areas, particularly in communities that would prefer to keep their young people in the state. Espy could also pull the smaller constituencies of Latino and Vietnamese voters. “If you are not thinking about the Latino vote in Mississippi, there is one and you should be,” says Shaw. Young people shocked into voting and civic engagement by the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests provide another critical mass of new voters.
The key issue in the Mississippi Senate campaign continues to be the Trump administration’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rural hospital closures that compound the crisis. Trump had a 45 percent approval rating in Mississippi on his handling of COVID at August’s end. A 2019 Navigant Consulting report found that 31 of Mississippi’s 64 rural hospitals, nearly 50 percent, were at risk for closure due to financial pressures, the third-highest percentage in the country.
When African Americans were disproportionately affected at the outset of the pandemic, whites could avert their gaze. But as disease and death crept into smaller, whiter towns, so did a new appreciation of and fears about the harsh realities of the pandemic. These crises may enable Espy to make some inroads, particularly among white women “who understand the havoc that Donald Trump has wrought,” he says. The state has experienced nearly 92,000 cases and about 2,800 deaths as of September 16, now almost equally split between Blacks and whites.
Yet there is also a presidential race to contend with, and in the past 50 years Republican Mississippi voted Democratic only once—for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Trump is all but certain to take the state, but if Joe Biden can chip away at Trump’s percentages for a narrower victory, Espy may have an opening.
Trump support isn’t Espy’s only obstacle. Mississippi is also an epicenter of voter suppression, and COVID-19 has not persuaded state officials to make voting any easier. There is no early voting and there are only a few groups of people who can vote by absentee ballot, including people under a doctor’s quarantine order or caring for a dependent under such a quarantine order.
“It is not a battle that cannot be won, but it is a battle that’s a tough one,” says Charles Taylor of the Mississippi NAACP.
Will Espy make any headway with the national Democratic Party in his effort to get more money and campaign staffers? Despite Espy’s close finish in 2018 (the best showing for a Democratic Senate contender since 1982) and current polling, party officials are fixated on other contests, be they incumbents who need help (like Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama) or possible Democratic pickups in more-competitive states (like House Speaker Sara Gideon in Maine or former astronaut Mark Kelly in Arizona).
The Mississippi state party apparatus is not much of a resource for the Senate hopeful, being in such disarray that a host of local 2019 candidates blamed their losses on the party. In the absence of a functioning party, there exists a state of affairs that led Espy to tell me that “the Espy campaign is the de facto state Democratic Party.”
So Espy has to rely on what he and allies like Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, can raise. Down-ballot contenders for state and local races in turn rely on his campaign to generate excitement, assistance, and dollars. What pains Espy is that the August 9 Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group poll that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee helped pay for has not persuaded any national Democratic organizations, even though Mississippi is one of the cheapest media markets in the country. “It’s going to take another couple million,” says Espy, “and Chuck Schumer and the DNC chairman can write that check.”
