On Monday, longtime Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood announced he would run for the state’s open governorship in 2019, with a formal kickoff scheduled for Wednesday. As the sole Democrat to win statewide office in Mississippi during the last 15 years, Hood may give Democrats their best chance at winning the governor's office since former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove last prevailed in 1999. However, an anti-democratic relic of Mississippi's 1890 Jim Crow constitution could stand in Hood’s way—even if he wins the most votes on Election Day.
The provision in question requires gubernatorial candidates to win both a majority of the statewide vote and a majority of the 122 districts that make up the state House. If no candidate wins both the popular vote and a majority of districts, the state House then picks the winner from the top two finishers.
That stacks the race against Hood or any other Democrat twice over: First, because the Republicans who control the state legislature have aggressively gerrymandered their own maps, making it much harder for a Democrat to win a majority of House districts than for a Republican; and second, because that same gerrymandered GOP majority in the House could simply install the Republican candidate as governor even if he or she loses the statewide vote.
That effectively gerrymanders the gubernatorial election in favor of the Republicans, since Hood would have to win the statewide vote by a wide margin in order to also carry a majority of House districts and avoid having his fate determined by the House. Yet just as with Donald Trump and the Electoral College, Republicans can win even if they lose.
This perverse provision has its roots in a racist constitution that was explicitly designed to eliminate the power of black voters.
Consequently, there’s a strong case to be made that this system both violates the federal Voting Rights Act and perhaps even the Supreme Court's "one person, one vote" jurisprudence, since an equal number of votes won’t be cast in each state House district. Indeed, the Supreme Court in 1963 struck down Georgia's system of determining statewide primary contests by a so-called "county unit system" that gave rural voters excess weight. However, a proposal to repeal Mississippi's system failed in the legislature earlier this year.
One reason this law likely still remains on the books is that Mississippi has never seen a candidate win the statewide vote while losing the district-level vote. The closest this system ever came to being tested was Musgrove's 1999 election, when he won a 49.6-48.5 plurality over Republican Mike Parker, and both candidates carried exactly half of the state House districts. Democrats still dominated the legislature at that point, however, and they easily elected Musgrove.
Since his first election in 2003, Hood has always won by double digits, even though Republicans made a considerable effort to defeat him in 2015. If he can replicate such a decisive victory, he may have a chance at winning 62 of the 122 state House districts needed to prevail. However, Mississippi is still a very red state, and if this law still remains in place next year, it could prove decisive—to the detriment of Democrats and the black voters who support them, in particular.