No surprise on this …..
Late polling for this race just confirmed what most pundits had pointed out….
Mississippi is a Southern GOP state to a degree more than even Alabama , where Democrats picked up a US Senate seat this year….
There simply is NOT enough of a black and white educated vote in the state for Democrats….
Donald Trump spent a day campaigning there amidst the late racial troubles Hyde-Smith was having…It came to be so bad that shaky Republicans resorted to just featuring Trump in the last minute campaign push, not Hyde-Smith….
Democrats can be proud that the margin of the GOP win is way lower than Trump’s 2016 winning numbers…
But?
Republicans will still hold the seat which will help them try to deal with the few Republicans that might want to support Democrats sometimes against Trump…..
Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith has won Mississippi’s Senate runoff, defeating Democrat Mike Espy after drawing intense scrutiny for comments during the four-week runoff campaign.
Hyde-Smith had 56 percent of the vote to Espy’s 44 percent when the Associated Press called the race with more than three-quarters of all precincts reporting. The result means Republicans will hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate next year, and it makes Hyde-Smith the first woman elected to represent Mississippi in the Senate. She will have to run for reelection to a full term in 2020, after being appointed to fill Thad Cochran’s seat earlier this year.
Hyde-Smith faced an unusually energetic special election challenge from Espy, a former congressman and Clinton-era agriculture secretary who inspired slim Democratic hopes of repeating the party’s miraculous Senate victory in Alabama last year, as Hyde-Smith faced a storm of controversy over a recent remark about attending a “public hanging.
Hyde-Smith’s win brought sighs of relief from Republicans, who see Mississippi as a practically automatic state for their party and feared any unusual circumstance upsetting the race, which took place just days after the Thanksgiving holiday. Republicans in Washington had been cautiously optimistic about a Hyde-Smith victory, but the party took no chances….
image…theHill
Consolation prize for Espy and Democrats…..
First Read: “In last night’s Senate runoff in Mississippi, appointed Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) defeated Democrat Mike Espy by 8 points, 54% to 46%. That’s down from President Trump’s 18-point advantage in the state in 2016 and former Sen. Thad Cochran’s 22-point win there in 2014.”
“Indeed, Espy’s 10-point overperformance from the 2016 presidential results is close to the average of Democrats’ showing in the eight other major special elections of the 2018 cycle – from GA-6 to the Roy Moore vs. Doug Jones Senate race in Alabama.”
Politicalwire…