Mike Espy and the Mississippi Senate election

Neo-Confederate incumbent  Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith was re-elected Tuesday in her contest against former Congressman Mike Espy. Geoff Pender et al report in Hyde-Smith defeats Espy in U.S. Senate runoff Clarion-Ledger 11/28/2018, "In incomplete and unofficial results, Hyde-Smith led Espy 54 percent to 46 percent." The later count was essentially the same.

They write of Espy's campaign:

Throughout the campaign, Espy played up his bipartisan credentials. He often avoided discussing or criticizing Trump, mentioned he'd endorsed former Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, and often steered the conversation back to health care — including protections for pre-existing conditions, rejuvenating Mississippi's struggling rural hospitals and lowering drug prices.

Even as Espy attracted help from major Democratic stars such as California Sen. Kamala Harris and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker on the campaign trail in recent days, he often repeated that he would vote independently if elected, and said he would keep a "Mississippi first" mindset. He held back in going after Hyde-Smith publicly over the hanging remarks, though his campaign did release ads slamming her, and in a recent debate, Espy said: "I don't know what's in your heart, but we all know what came out of your mouth," and added it had given the state a "black eye." [my emphasis]

This makes it sound like Espy ran a conventional, maybe dull, campaign and lost.

But Matt Viser and David Weigel provide better context for the story (Mississippi runoff: Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith wins racially charged election over Democrat Mike Espy Washington Post 11/27/2018), explaining that it was "a surprisingly strong challenge by Democratic opponent Mike Espy."

Espy, who would have become the state’s first African American senator since Reconstruction, ran the state’s most competitive Democratic campaign for U.S. Senate in decades but fell short in his efforts to bring historic numbers of black voters to the polls. ...

Espy’s campaign executed its turnout strategy, running ahead of its Nov. 6 vote in nearly every county. He was on track to carry all 25 of the state’s majority-black counties, most by bigger margins than he’d won in the first round. He also cut into traditional Republican margins in some suburban counties. In DeSoto County, on the outskirts of Memphis, he improved from 34 percent in the first round to 41 percent Tuesday. [my emphasis]

The Democrats essentially wrote off Senate races in Mississippi decades ago. Mississippi did have a Democratic Governor as late as 2004, Ronnie Musgrove.

Contesting statewide races and Coingressional races is important. It keeps the party organization intact and keeps the base voters in the habit of voting. It also gives the party the chance to keep its messaging and positions in the eyes of the press and the public and to communicate its criticisms of the other party.

An eight point spread in the vote is eight points. It's a clear win for Hyde-Smith. But it also means that to turn that margin into a Democratic win, they need to flip the percentages by 5% of the voters, by some combination of improving registration and turnout of Democrats and by pulling some swing voters from the Republicans. Mississippi is still the poorest of the 50 states, as it has been for decades. And the white voters who vote in overwhelming majorities for Republicans are certainly not all the kind of plutocrats whose interests are the only ones the Republican Party ever does anything for.

Conventional political wisdom still holds that Democratic candidates in Mississippi and other Deep South states need to pursue a Blue Dog strategy to get elected, i.e., try to sound as much like Republicans as possible. But it doesn't matter how mild and innoffensive the message is as long as there isn't a solid, visible Democratic Party presence in statewide elections. So Espy's campaign is a milestone that the state and national Democratic Party can build on if they choose to.

Lucy McBath win in Georgia's 6th District, once represented by the Republian "revolutionary" Newt Gingrich, is one 2018 example of a straightforwardly partisan, African-American woman winning against a standard-issue conservative Republican. Jelani Cobb explains (The Crucial Significance of Lucy McBath’s Win in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District New Yorker 11//17/2018) :

The two moments are as apt an encapsulation as you’ll find of the significance of McBath’s victory last week in the race for Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, situated just north of Atlanta. McBath, a Democrat who ran on a platform of growing the economy, funding education, and addressing climate change, was inescapably wed in the public’s mind to the issue of gun reform. Her despair and her resolve are equal parts of her political identity. She narrowly defeated the Republican incumbent, Karen Handel, in a race that remained somewhat low-profile among the prognostications about which districts the Democrats might flip in the midterms. Last year, the Democrat Jon Ossoff gained national attention in his bid to win the seat, which opened after the Republican Tom Price left it for what turned out to be a short stint as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Trump Administration. Ossoff lost to Handel in a runoff, by less than four percentage points, with 48.1 per cent of the vote. A measure of the skepticism about McBath’s chances could be seen in the fact that, before last Tuesday, the race was being referred to in some quarters as the “Ossoff race without Ossoff.”

I think Cobb overstates the similarity beetween the Ossoff and McBath's campaigns. Ossoff followed the standard Democratic National Committee advice to sound as moderate as possible and rely heavily on media ad buys. And the amounts of money that went into the Ossoff-Handel race were staggering. Cobb: "The 2017 race became the most expensive House contest ever, costing some fifty-five million dollars. McBath’s campaign spent $1.2 million, but she improved on Ossoff’s margin by more than two points."

McBath was also heavily and proudly identified with gun control advocacy, which we could also call opposing the prolifberation of small arms in the US. The Democrats nationally basically backed off gun control after the 2000 election, thinking it would hurt them in places like the Deep South. The result is that the Republicans are more fanatical than ever about gun proliferation and they routinely accuse the Democrats of being "gun-grabbers" and the like. And, oh yeah, mass shootings have now become a routine event in the United States. She may have been a particularly sympathetic messager on that issue because of her own loss to gun violence. (Jamilah Kin, A White Man Shot and Killed Her Only Son. Now Lucy McBath Is Running So It Doesn’t Happen to Anyone Else. Mother Jones Mar/Apr 2018)