Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith defeated Democrat Mike Espy 54-46 in Tuesday’s special election for the Senate in Mississippi, giving the GOP a 53-47 Senate majority come January. Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to replace longtime Sen. Thad Cochran earlier this year, will be up for a full six-year term in 2020.
While Team Red held this seat, Republicans ended up working harder here than they probably planned to just three weeks ago. In the officially nonpartisan primary on Nov. 6 (under state law, candidates aren’t identified by their party in special elections), Hyde-Smith and fellow Republican Chris McDaniel took a combined 58 percent of the vote, while Espy and a little-known second Democrat won 42 percent. However, the runoff quickly attracted the bad kind of national attention when progressive journalist Lamar White posted footage of Hyde-Smith saying of a supporter, "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row."
Hyde-Smith didn’t apologize for showing eagerness to witness a lynching, and Espy, who is black, ran a commercial going after her over her comments, as well as her “joke” that it should be harder for liberal college students to vote. Several major companies, including Walmart and Major League Baseball, also publicly asked Hyde-Smith to return donations they’d made to her campaign. In a familiar scene, national Republicans reportedly became worried about Hyde-Smith’s prospects, and the NRSC and Senate Leadership Fund ended up spending a combined $2.8 million here, while Espy’s allies at Senate Majority PAC threw down a total of $874,000.
It was always going to be extremely difficult for Democrats to win in a state this red, and particularly one where voting is so heavily polarized along racial lines. However, Hyde-Smith’s 54-46 victory was nevertheless the worst performance for Team Red in a Mississippi Senate race since 1988, when Republican Trent Lott flipped an open Democratic-held seat by the same 54-46 margin.
The runoff also gives us the opportunity to see how Mississippi’s politics have evolved in recent years. In 2008, the last time the Magnolia State hosted a nonpartisan Senate special, appointed GOP Sen. Roger Wicker held off former Democratic Gov. Ronny Musgrove by a similar 55-45 spread. Miles Coleman has put together some illustrative county-level maps that compare the 2008 special to this year’s race, finding that many areas in the Memphis suburbs and Jackson area, as well as the Mississippi Delta, got bluer over the last decade, while the Gulf Coast and rural northeast moved in the opposite direction.