Tuesday is Election Day in a wide variety of states, and two of the biggest races to watch will be the gubernatorial contests in Kentucky and Mississippi. In Kentucky, unpopular GOP Gov. Matt Bevin is trying to fend off Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear. In Mississippi, GOP Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood are competing to succeed termed-out GOP Gov. Phil Bryant. In this post we’ll be looking at several key counties in each state for early clues to see which candidates are meeting the benchmarks they’d need to win.
With benchmarks, you can get a sense of a) which counties matter most—in other words, which counties are populous enough that they have a real impact on the overall results—and b) what candidates need to score in those counties that matter, in order to be on track to win statewide. In other words, when a lot of flamingly red rural counties have reported but the more populous metropolitan counties are only starting to trickle in, you can look at the percentages that are showing up in that trickle, and quickly gauge whether your candidate is hitting the necessary targets.
We’ll start with the race in Kentucky:
| COUNTY |
% OF ‘16 STATEWIDE VOTE |
WHAT WE NEED TO BREAK 50% |
2016 PRES. |
| STATEWIDE |
100.0 |
50/50 |
33/63 |
| JEFFERSON |
18.4 |
71/28 |
54/41 |
| FAYETTE |
7.1 |
68/29 |
51/42 |
| KENTON |
3.7 |
51/47 |
34/60 |
| BOONE |
3.0 |
43/55 |
26/68 |
| WARREN |
2.5 |
52/46 |
35/59 |
| DAVIESS |
2.4 |
48/50 |
31/63 |
| HARDIN |
2.2 |
49/49 |
32/62 |
| CAMPBELL |
2.2 |
51/46 |
34/59 |
As with all our benchmark posts, you’ll see three sets of numbers. The first column is what percentage of the total statewide votes each county contributed in the baseline election (and the one we’re using here is the 2016 presidential election, since that’s the most recent statewide election either of these states had). For instance, Jefferson County, where Louisville is, contributes nearly one-fifth of the state’s votes, at 18.4% of the total.
The third column is the percentages that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump got in 2016. And the middle column is, using the 2016 vote as guidelines, what Beshear needs to get in each major county in order to squeak over the line at 50%+1.
Ordinarily, this is done through simple extrapolation. Because third-party candidates got 4% of the vote in Kentucky in 2016, I’m taking an intermediate step here, adding 2% to each side of the balance sheet so that we’re modeling to 50/50 instead of 48/48. While Libertarian John Hicks is on the ballot in Kentucky this year, he’s been a non-entity in polling so far and it’s unlikely he’ll get anywhere near 4% in the end.
Ordinarily, I only show the counties that add up to 2% or more of the state’s total; that’s not to say the other counties don’t matter, but just to keep the table a nice manageable length. However, you might notice that Kentucky doesn’t have a lot of counties that contribute 2% or more of the total. That’s a factor of how rural Kentucky is, compared with most other states, as well as how freaking many small counties there are in Kentucky (it has 120 counties, the third-highest total of any state).
So, I’m throwing in a couple more counties that are representative of more outlying parts of the state that aren’t represented above: McCracken County (where Paducah is, in the westernmost part of the state) and Pike County (in the mountainous eastern Appalachian part of the state). It’s entirely possible that Beshear could still lose even while hitting all his benchmarks in the urban parts of the state (Fayette County is where Lexington is, and Kenton and Boone Counties are suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio), if he tanks and pulls in Democratic-presidential-candidate-style numbers in the dark-red rural parts of the state. So it’s important to keep an eye on the “rest” of Kentucky as well.
| McCRACKEN |
1.6 |
46/53 |
29/66 |
| PIKE |
1.3 |
34/66 |
17/80 |
Next are the benchmarks for Mississippi. Even though it has a red-state reputation, Mississippi was a considerably closer state in 2016 than Kentucky was … though still a long way from being a swing state. That’s because Mississippi is an extremely inelastic state, because of its racial polarization. In other words, Democrats can pretty reliably count on getting around 40% of the vote there because of its large African American percentage (the highest of any state), but because so few of its white residents are willing to vote Democratic, the climb from 40% to 50% is incredibly steep.
If anyone’s able to do it, though, Hood—who’s a long-time fixture in state politics and considerably more conservative than nationwide Democrats—may be able to. Here’s the road map for how he’d do it: he’d need to utterly dominate in Hinds County (where Jackson is) while breaking even in Madison County (the closest thing Mississippi has to middle-class suburbs) and in middle-sized towns like Hattiesburg (Forrest County) and Columbus (Lowndes County). (Unlike in Kentucky, the two major parties combined for 98% of the vote in Mississippi in 2016, so I’m doing a simple extrapolation to 50/48 here.)
| COUNTY |
% OF ‘16 STATEWIDE VOTE |
WHAT WE NEED TO BREAK 50% |
2016 PRES. |
| STATEWIDE |
100.0 |
50/48 |
40/58 |
| HINDS |
7.9 |
81/17 |
71/27 |
| DE SOTO |
5.5 |
41/55 |
31/65 |
| HARRISON |
5.2 |
43/54 |
33/64 |
| RANKIN |
5.2 |
32/65 |
22/75 |
| MADISON |
4.1 |
51/46 |
41/56 |
| JACKSON |
4.1 |
40/58 |
30/68 |
| LEE |
2.7 |
40/58 |
30/68 |
| LAUDERDALE |
2.4 |
48/50 |
38/60 |
| JONES |
2.3 |
37/61 |
27/71 |
| FORREST |
2.3 |
52/45 |
42/55 |
| LOWNDES |
2.1 |
56/42 |
46/52 |
| LAMAR |
2.0 |
31/66 |
21/76 |
While there certainly are a number of mostly white rural counties that are a radioactive shade of red, Mississippi does have a lot of something that Kentucky doesn’t have: rural counties with an African American majority that vote heavily Democratic, most of which are located in the Delta in the state’s northwest quadrant. None of these counties are very populous, though; the largest is Washington County, which represents 1.4% of the state’s total. Clinton won here 68/31, so Hood would need to shoot for a 78/21 victory here and in similar smaller counties in the Delta, while also not letting turnout fall off from 2016.
There’s one final weird wrinkle in Mississippi that I can’t even begin to account for with this very simple extrapolation method: the state’s unique, Jim Crow-era requirement that the winning candidate must also win a majority of state House districts, lest the election otherwise be to the state’s Republican-held legislature to decide. A federal district court ruling on Friday, however, strongly suggested that the court would strike down that rule if it did in fact come into play (i.e. if Hood won a plurality in the popular vote, but not a majority of districts).
Polls close at 6 PM ET in the portion of Kentucky located in the Eastern time zone, and we’ll start our liveblog then at Daily Kos Elections and tweeting as well. Polls close in the rest of Kentucky an hour later and in Mississippi at 8 PM ET/7 PM local time. We hope you’ll join us for what will be an eventful night!
