MS Megathread: Hyde-Smith wins by 8

[OneJ]

No matter if you think it’s racist or not, that’s still not a good look for you to be a public figure saying something as ambiguous as that when not only your state is close to 40% black, but you know the nation has a “liberal bias” towards things like this (from the perspective of someone like CHS, of course). I’ve never heard of that phrase before, btw.

[OneJ]

https://mobile.twitter.com/espyforsenate/status/1062401082540867585

The amount of attention Espy’s now getting is ridiculous. Before that comment from CHS, he only had less than 8,000 followers on Twitter. Now it’s over 17,000 and tweets like the one above are also getting a lot of retweets/likes.

[OneJ]

https://mobile.twitter.com/mviser/status/1063868172330254336?s=21

Remember Blackburn’s internals looking bad? Yeah, I do too. I also remember how that race turned out...

[OneJ]

“Private Republican polling” should be taken with a major grain of salt. Blackburn’s internals were said to be looking close (and for that matter, Bredesen’s too). It wouldn’t surprise me one bit that her up by only five points in GOP private polling is fake news.

[OneJ]

Hyde-Smith will win, but racism won't be the only reason. Mississippi has few if any major metropolitan areas (depends what you count a major) and is culturally conservative in areas outside race... I bet for example, Mississippi black people are more anti-gay marriage than Houston or Atlanta black people. All these factors would favor Hyde-Smith in any case.

I mean black voters still overwhelmingly for Democrats despite being more conservative on gay marriage than other races. That doesn’t really help CHS at all. In fact, black voters in MS typically vote for Dems by at least the same rate or more.

[OneJ]

Yeah, that debate was definitely a waste of my time.

[OneJ]

I got somewhat bored, so I decided to see how well Dems And Pubs did in the Jackson Metro (Hinds, Rankin, Madison) for both Senate races this year. Doesn’t have anything to do with the upcoming runoff.

Regular Senate:
Baria - 84,181 (50.3%)
Wicker - 83,129 (49.7%)

Special Senate:
Espy/Bartee - 88,565 (51.7%)
Hyde-Smith/McDaniel - 82,891 (48.3%)

It also still interests me how well Madison County votes with the state, partly because racial demographics of this county match the state well. It voted 58.8-39.6 Wicker while the state voted 58.5-39.5 Wicker.

[OneJ]

Yeah, that debate was definitely a waste of my time.

Agreed. Despite her unimpressive performance, Hyde-Smith is the winner because this was basically Espy's last chance to change the game and he didn't. Cindy will win by 15 or more next Tuesday unless she has a major gaffe that offends Republican voters.

What killed me was when she was asked a question specifically regarding criminal justice reform. Part of her answer was repeating that the wall needed to be built and maintaining secure borders...seriously?

[OneJ]

Will someone poll this race in the next days ?

RRH has said that they will and that’s about it.

[OneJ]

If this was settled by an actual brawl, Espy would destroy Hyde-Smith.

Yes a fully grown man would beat a woman in a physical brawl bagel.

Stellar observation.

I was hoping I wasn’t the only one who saw something wrong with that.

[OneJ]

RRH did a poll. They're pretty partisan, not really sure how their polling is.

They have Hyde Smith 54, Espy 44.

https://twitter.com/RRHElections/status/1066783767145193472

This is about what I expect for the final result to look like. The crosstabs look believable for the most part as well.

[OneJ]

The ideal turnout for Epsy really falls into a small sweet spot of sorts - even more so than throughout the South in general. Too low and that means black voters have just sat the election out; too high and the electorate ends up resembling the state at-large.

I can't be for sure - it's not necessarily fixed - but assuming there's any legit wind at his back right now, the sweet spot is probably around 40% plus or minus a couple of points (~750k voters).

This is pretty much what I was thinking for a while now.

[OneJ]

It looks like CHS (interestingly, though not surprising) seems to underperforming in counties with colleges.

[OneJ]

Mississippi always had a D-counting bias. I remember back in 2016 when HRC was leading Trump in early results.

[OneJ]

I don’t have any knowledge or information about provisionals in Mississippi other than the fact that, as you might expect, lean very Dem. MS was was pretty slow in counting provisionals for the 11/6 elections. I think it took a week or so to get the current vote totals up for those races.

However, I’m quite satisfied with Espy’s performance here. I’ve always expected a loss but not him getting to the single digits. The incoming maps should be interesting, for sure.

Also, this runoff had pretty good turnout instead of the usual drop off from initial election.