As embattled incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) faces scrutiny over racially tinged comments, she’s relying on the support of one of the biggest names in Silicon Valley to help her down the stretch of her increasingly tight runoff race.
Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook and the founder of the pioneering music sharing service Napster, provided a huge cash infusion this year for the Mississippi Victory Fund, one of a handful of high-dollar political groups backing Hyde-Smith’s election.
He made the donation in an effort to defeat Mississippi state senator Chris McDaniel, Hyde-Smith’s controversial Republican opponent, during their primary race. And it worked—McDaniel, a man who had ties to the neo-Confederate movement, took money from figures connected to the KKK, and made numerous inflammatory comments about women and minorities, lost badly.
But the leftover funds are now being used to help Hyde-Smith in her runoff against her Democratic opponent, former congressman and Department of Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. And they’re being spent as Hyde-Smith herself comes under intense criticism, first over remarks earlier this month in which she joked that she would attend a supporter’s “public hanging;” and then a report Tuesday that Hyde-Smith had posted a photo of herself at a memorial to Confederate president Jefferson Davis, donning a Confederate military cap, with a caption that read, in part, “Mississippi history at its best!”
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