Mississippi’s Cindy Hyde-Smith is a flaming racist, but hey, it’s not like she has a history of sexually assaulting teenagers and alienating her own party’s establishment, so she defeated Democrat Mike Espy in Tuesday’s special run-off election for Senate. Hyde-Smith had been appointed to replace retiring Sen. Thad Cochran earlier in the year, and on Tuesday she won the election to keep the seat for the rest of Cochran’s term, until 2020.
Espy does appear to have kept the race closer than recent Mississippi Senate elections. Hyde-Smith currently has 54 percent of the vote with 95 percent of precincts reporting. Earlier in the month, Republican Sen. Roger Wicker was re-elected with 59 percent of the vote. But let’s briefly consider what Mississippi voters had to decide they were okay with to vote for Hyde-Smith:
- She said of a supporter that “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row,” then dragged her feet on apologizing for raising the specter of lynching in such a cheerful, I’m-right-on-board way.
- She took campaign donations from a notorious white supremacist.
- Hyde-Smith denied there was anything nefarious in video showing her saying it was a “great idea” to make it harder for “liberal folks in those other schools” to vote, where, in context, “those other schools” were historically black colleges.
- Hyde-Smith herself attended a "segregation academy," which to be fair was probably her parents’ call. The fact that she sent her daughter to one, though, was absolutely her call.
- She appeared in a photo smiling happily in Confederate gear, and has a history of voting to honor Confederates during her time in the state legislature.
A slew of companies demanded contributions back after Hyde-Smith’s public hanging comment (though not without pressure), but Mississippi voters apparently decided all this was just fine to have representing them in the United States Senate. Way to go, guys.