Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood is running for governor of Mississippi this year, and as we’ve noted before, a Jim Crow-era law means that Hood could lose even if he wins the most votes on Election Day. That’s because the state's 1890 constitution 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, where Republicans hold a wide 74-48 majority, then picks a winner from the top two finishers. Given the GOP’s shamelessness in embracing undemocratic outcomes, it’s unlikely they’d choose Hood, even if he wins the most votes. And thanks to Mississippi’s gerrymandered map, which the GOP drew up in 2012, we know it’ll be difficult for Hood to carry 62 House seats. But just how difficult?
To answer that, we can look to the results of Mississippi’s 2015 statewide contests broken down by state House district, which the state has calculated. Because of serious insufficiencies in the data available from the state, Daily Kos Elections has not yet calculated the results of the 2016 presidential race by legislative district, and the state has not published results for the 2015 contests by state Senate district.
However, the data we do have gives us a good look at just how strong the GOP’s House gerrymander is, and how much would need to go right for Hood if he wants to win a majority of the districts. The answer, in short, is that Hood would need a great deal of good fortune.
We’ll start with a look at Hood’s own 2015 re-election bid for attorney general, where he defeated Republican Mike Hurst by a 55-45 margin. Hood carried 66 state House seats while Hurst took 56, meaning that the Democrat won 54 percent of the districts while winning 55 percent of the vote. That doesn’t look especially bad for Hood, but the numbers get worse for him when we drill just below the surface.
One way to assess how much this legislative map does (or doesn’t) favor one party is to sort each seat in each chamber by Hood’s margin of victory over Hurst and see how the seat in the middle—known as the median seat—voted. Because the state House has an even number of seats, we average the two middle seats to come up with the median point in the chamber. The median seat backed Hood 51.6-48.4, about 7.5 points to the right of his statewide win.
All this means that, if Hood had only won re-election by a narrow margin in 2015, he likely would have lost a majority of state House seats. While Hood’s decisive victory allowed him to carry some very red turf, it’s going to be difficult for him to win this year’s gubernatorial race—where he won’t have the power of incumbency on his side—by anything like a 10-point margin.
The other 2015 races do an even better job of illustrating just how rough this map is for Democrats. Republican Gov. Phil Bryant won re-election against Democrat Robert Gray by an imposing 66-32 margin statewide, but he carried the median seat 74-25, which is about 16 points to the right of the state as a whole. Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who is the GOP’s frontrunner for governor this year, won his second term back then by a 60-36 margin yet carried the median seat 67-29, which is about 14 points to the right of the state.
It’s difficult enough for a Democrat to win statewide office in Mississippi, a state that backed Trump 58-40. By requiring candidates to win both a majority of the vote and a majority of the state House districts under a map gerrymandered to aid the GOP, the deck is stacked against Team Blue. And none of this is an accident: This perverse provision has its roots in a racist 19th Century constitution that was explicitly designed to eliminate the power of black voters—the same voters who now make up much of the Democratic base in Mississippi.
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 last 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 Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove's 1999 election, when he won a 49.6-48.5 plurality over Republican Mike Parker. Both candidates carried exactly half of the state House districts, but Democrats still dominated the legislature at that point, and they easily elected Musgrove.
Mississippi Democrats missed a key opportunity back then to scrap this unfair law. However, it may not be too late for voting rights advocates to go to court to remove this ugly remnant of the Jim Crow era from the books. But Election Day is Nov. 5, so the clock is ticking loudly.
N.B.: In the document the state has provided breaking out 2015 statewide results by state House district, the total votes in each race differ slightly from the state's official summary totals found here. For instance, in the race for attorney general, the first document shows a total of 400,110 votes for Hood, while the second shows 395,969 votes. The source of the discrepancy is not clear.
