Every State. Every race. Right here.
This is number nine in a planned series of 50 entries between now and November, looking at each of the 50 states in terms of every race on that state's ticket--Presidential, Gubernatorial, Senate, House, State legislatures--the whole ball of cotton. Special attention paid to identifying and promoting the most important contests per state.
With our new Congressman Travis Childers’ very public capture of "A Congressional seat in rural Mississippi" (as opposed to, I guess, urban Mississippi), sending Republicans into a panic nationwide, Mississippi is in the seat of honor, and a reminder to the progressive blogosphere, that, yes, every state counts! Here’s to the State of Mississippi!
Previous diaries in this series:
Delaware: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Arkansas: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Illinois: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Texas, Part One: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Texas, Part Two: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Utah: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Massachusetts: http://www.dailykos.com/...
North Carolina: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Hawaii: http://www.dailykos.com/...
For news and information about the Magnolia State, there’s nothing better than the Cottonmouth Blog. I’ve consulted it often during the Childers special election, and hereby pronounce it Good. (There you go, Cotton. Your blog is officially Admiral Approved.)
http://cottonmouthblog.blogspot.com/
Mississippi is divided into three parts politically. There’s the Appalachian Northeast quadrant, which is more mountainous, impoverished, and elderly than the rest of the state and less arable, populated and educated—though it does boast the University at Oxford as well as the whole Faulkner literary tradition. The region tends to be Republican—although as we see from the Childers race, that can change.
There’s the Gulf Coast (Biloxi, Pascagoula), also known as the "Red Riviera", which makes the Appalachian Northeast quadrant look like solid blue Vermont by comparison. These voters inflicted Trent Lott on America in the 1970s, when The South didn’t even HAVE Republicans!
And there’s the delta and the cotton belt in the middle, where concentrations of African-American voters vie off with opposing concentrations of conservative white voters, and which by itself would be a battleground swing region. Statewide, its slight blue tint usually gets outvoted by the other two regions.
http://www.nationalatlas.com/...
Here’s a brief roundup of the 2008 political outlook:
PRESIDENT: Leans GOP. Here, however, is my case for why Obama can win Mississippi and other deep South states.
- Unprecedented black turnout for Obama. That much is obvious, but it won’t do it alone.
- White voters hard hit by Bush Recession II. It wasn’t the black vote that put Travis Childers into Congress. Not in the 1st District. It was hardscrabble Appalachians (that’s right, the same Appalachians who have been choosing Hillary Clinton over Obama in larger numbers than any other Demographic) who have been voting Republican since the Newtist era and who have had it with job losses, school closings, and their sons being sent overseas to be cannon fodder. FDR’s New Deal made the less affluent Southerners into a reliably Democratic voting bloc for more or less 50 years, and some good old fashioned poverty relief will win them back. Unlike, say, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas, Mississippi’s affluent Republicans are very few and far between, mostly clustered around the Gulf Coast.
- Dixie Republican ambivalence toward McCain. They don’t like or trust him. Many will hold their noses and vote for him over any Democrat, but they won’t canvass or go out of their way. Many others will turn to Bob Barr instead, or sit out entirely. In fact, the more likely a blue landslide appears, the more likely that the worst of the wingnuts will sit on their hands and let it happen, so that they can claim credit for it and demand that the GOP kowtow to their demands to get their heads out of the 20th Century and go back to the 19th. The GOP base is a Frankenstein creature that is never, ever satisfied and is in the process of killing its makers.
If those three forces coalesce, the likelihood of some Obama wins in the deep South is very real indeed.
SENATE: We got BOTH US Senate seats up for grabs, although only one is really on the map.
First, there’s five-termer Toad Cochran going for a sixth term and widely considered among the few completely safe Gooper incumbents. His opponent, Erik Fleming, deserves praise and honors for taking on a thankless task.
http://erikfleming.org/...
The real money race is for the other, open, Senate race, where popular former Governor Ronnie Musgrove is taking on Roger Wicker, who left the House district just won by Childers to be (probably illegally, but, hey, Republicans control the judges, so they got away with it) appointed to sit as the "incumbent" in November. Until this week, the Musgrove race sat in the middle of the second tier, along with races in Texas and Kentucky that are on the map but uphill. Look for the Childers win to cause people to re-evaluate our chances in Mississippi and make this one a barn-burner.
http://www.musgroveforsenate.net/
GOVERNOR : Not up until 2011, at which point Haley Barbour will be term limited. It isn’t clear whether the 2011 election will be in time for a new, maybe Democratic, Governor to make a difference in drawing the districts for the 2012 election, but this and the State Senate should be watched closely anyhow.
OTHER STATEWIDE: Nope, none of those on the menu in 2008 either. Good thing, because you can see we have our hands full. Every statewide office, except attorney general Jim Hood, is presently held by a Republican, which could explain why Mississippi is consistently ranked dead last among the states in terms of per capita wealth, health, schools...mission accomplished, right, Republicans?
If the Childers win is a harbinger of a sea change to come, it’s badly needed. We will have a LOT of housecleaning to do at the state level.
STATE LEGISLATURE: These seats are elected in odd-numbered years, so there won’t be any changes in 2008 other than special elections to fill vacancies. The lower House is safely Democratic at 73D-46R, with three vacancies. The State Senate is a virtual tie at 27D-25, and was in Republican hands prior to the 2007 election. As is the case in many Southern states, the MS legislature has been plagued by a steady trickle of majority democrats deciding to switch parties. Maybe the trend will go back the other way if it looks like a Dem Renaissance is about to happen. However, even with Democrats in the majority, don’t expect Mississippi to become a bastion for progressive innovation. Southern Democrats are as conservative as New England Republicans, and are capable of veering into Zell Miller territory and scolding the national Democratic party with as much zeal as the GOP does. To be fair, many of them are in solid red seats and may feel they have to do this in order to stay in office at all.
Congressional Districts
District 1—TRAVIS CHILDERS. What more can I say that hasn’t been said on a dozen entries since Tuesday? Welcome, Congressman Travis!
He has a rematch in November, of course, and a lot of Goopers are saying that, well, turnout will be different when everyone’s voting for President and maybe they’ll take it back. Sure, and we said that in 2004 about CA-50. Childers will have advantages running for "re-election" as the incumbent Congressman from the majority party, that he didn’t have just now.
5/13 changed everything.
http://childers.house.gov/
District 2—Bennie Thompson (Inc D). This is a black-majority district, and a safe one for Thompson, though not as safe as most of the other Southern black-majority districts. Republicans have often made flatulent noises about one day taking this seat, and have made the sensible move of actually running black conservatives against Thompson. So far, however, they’ve had no luck, and this is one district in which Obama’s presence on the ticket will have significant coattails.
http://benniethompson.house.gov/...
District 3—Joel Gill (D) v. Gregg Harper (R). This is the other cotton belt district, in central Mississippi. From the map, it looks like they made this district out of whatever was left over after they carved out the other three. The Gooper Incumbent is retiring, leaving the only GOP Congressional seat in MS open. Before the races took shape, I would have pegged the 3rd as more likely to flip to the Democrats than the 1st, even though it has a nominally higher +R PVI. There are many solid blue, mostly black, counties here, and about half the district was formerly held by Democrat Ronnie Shows before MS lost a district in 2002. But that was before Childers took off running and the Democrats settled on a no-name sacrificial lamb with no resources.
To be fair, Harper the Republican appears to be a lightweight, too, and looks like he could be taken out by a big-hitter Democrat, if Democrats make a comeback here, and maybe if they redistrict and put more of Jackson into the 3rd. This year, it’s hard to see how Gill could catch up. But it is an open seat, and as we learned this week, anything can happen.
http://www.gillforcongress.org/
District 4—Gene Taylor (Inc D). The solid red Gulf Coast district, and the Democrat holding the single reddest district currently held by a Democrat. And he’s been holding it easily since 1990, and this year will be no exception. Watch for him to come to the aid of Childers and Musgrove. Safe Dem
http://www.house.gov/...
REDISTRICTING MISSISSIPPI: Very slight touches. If it can be done without putting Bennie Thompson in real danger, I would put all of (blue) Jackson into the 3rd, and Southaven/De Soto County (red) into the 2nd, which would require the 1st to extend southward into the 3rd somewhat (mixed bag), and leave the 4th exactly as it is. This would make the 3rd district more competitive for Democrats and make the 2nd somewhat more competitive for Republicans also, but hopefully not too much.
After the 2004 election, and even after 2006, there was a good deal of informal talk about "writing off the South" as wasted effort, unalterably Republican for ever. Southern bloggers reacted with understandable frustration. My take was that each side had an equal and opposite responsibility. The progressive netroots has an obligation, if we want to be effective, to honor the 50-state, 435-district strategy and work hard in all regions of America, even the hardest ones to win. Some might say, especially those regions, since they need the most work. People in those regions similarly have a responsibility to demonstrate that our efforts in those regions have at least some chance of being rewarded.
Well, guess what? The South just held up its end of the bargain, in MS-1 and in LA-6. There are few areas harder for Democrats to compete in than Northeast Mississippi, and so if we can win here, we can win everywhere. Maybe not all at once, maybe not now or soon, but eventually. Building the infrastructure, slowly, with the care that it needs, will be rewarded over time.
Here’s to the State of Mississippi! Come join us on the Group W Bench, and teach us a thing or two about how you did it. Some of us in the north--like in East Oregon--could use a lesson in flipping the districts that "everyone knows will be Red forever, so why bother trying..."