Mississippi Megathread 2023 (user search)
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  Mississippi Megathread 2023 (search mode)
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Author Topic: Mississippi Megathread 2023  (Read 20771 times)
MT Treasurer
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« on: August 11, 2023, 08:31:15 PM »

This race has way more upset potential than many on here seem to think. I'm expecting a low-/mid-single-digit race at this point, and it is winnable for Pressley.

It's funny because I think Beshear is overrated in KY while Pressley is underrated in MS and a KY-R/MS-D split is not completely out of the question.

Pressley is much more palatable to Republican-leaning/culturally conservative voters than Beshear, and Cameron is less tainted than Reeves. Reeves is precisely the kind of politician people will throw out the moment they're actually given an alternative they can stomach.
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« Reply #1 on: August 13, 2023, 01:33:41 AM »

This race has way more upset potential than many on here seem to think. I'm expecting a low-/mid-single-digit race at this point, and it is winnable for Pressley.

It's funny because I think Beshear is overrated in KY while Pressley is underrated in MS and a KY-R/MS-D split is not completely out of the question.

Pressley is much more palatable to Republican-leaning/culturally conservative voters than Beshear, and Cameron is less tainted than Reeves. Reeves is precisely the kind of politician people will throw out the moment they're actually given an alternative they can stomach.

I do get the sense that Beshear has been behaving too much like Generic D and may have gotten overconfident after the pro-life referendum failed.

Do you think KY is a good bellwether/predictor for the presidential election the year after? Some think it’s just a coincidence, but there are more than a few parallels between Biden and Beshear:

*Both have family names that are more than familiar to voters and used that fact to their advantage in their campaigns.
*Both were fortunate enough to run against unusually incompetent opponents who seemed unwilling/unable to change course and essentially did themselves in.
*Both campaigned as non-partisan moderates above the fray who promised a return to normalcy and a focus on kitchen-table issues while ending up governing more liberally than their campaign rhetoric led people to believe. 
*Both won very narrowly.
*Both won with the same coalition. (enough of a rural/small-town overperformance in select parts of the state/country, huge suburban shifts, blowout margins in urban areas)

If Beshear loses and Pressley pulls it off in MS, we’re essentially back to where we were in 2015, just with LA and MS swapped and Pressley being our JBE this time. (FYI: I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that Pressley can’t pull it off when JBE did it by double digits in a super-R-friendly environment with a similar profile against a similarly scandal-plagued opponent. I don’t buy into the "inelastic MS" narrative, or at least I don’t buy it being far more inflexible than LA.)

It does make you wonder when Republicans will actually get all three of LA/KY/MS — it’s never happened before, and there’s always that one race which seems to elude them.
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« Reply #2 on: August 13, 2023, 11:44:44 AM »

The key difference between KY-GOV and the presidential race next year, though, is that Beshear is quite popular (otherwise he wouldn’t have a chance.) Either way, KY has been far more open to electing Democrats, and even a very strong candidate couldn’t beat Reeves last time, so I’m not sure I really see this being another LA-GOV type situation unless there’s some huge development that damages Reeves quite a bit more.

On the other hand, Cameron isn’t as unpopular as Trump, which would be the equivalent of running Bevin again.

Also, the gap between MS and KY in 2019 was... literally just five points, with Hood losing by 5 and Beshear winning in a virtual tie. You’d think it was a 15- or 20-point gap reading this thread and other analyses of the KY/MS races.

KY being "far more open to electing Democrats than MS" is a common take but one that — nowadays, at least — is fairly disputable, as Beshear was the only Democrat who managed to win in 2019 and only did so by the skin of his teeth against an absolute joke of an opponent. In notable federal races, Mike Espy actually came closer to ousting Cindy Hyde-Smith than Amy McGrath came to defeating Mitch McConnell. KY went for Donald Trump by 26 points, MS did so by 16 points.

I frankly don’t believe that there’s a convincing argument that the MS of 2023 is considerably more "inelastic" (you know my thoughts on this nebulous term) than the LA of 2015. Yes, MS Democrats got absolutely blown out in 2022, but so did LA Democrats in 2014, and we all know how much good that did David Vitter in his gubernatorial race. A Pressley win wouldn’t be a sign of the state's R trend coming to a halt or reversing, it would just be another unique JBE-type situation.

Besides, the exact same argument was already made in 2015 (including by xingkerui, who was convinced that LA was going to be an easy Vitter win and was far more likely to go R than KY) — LA is inelastic, KY isn’t, therefore Conway has a much better chance of winning than JBE. That turned out to be a complete fallacy because people didn’t take a close look at what actually matters in those races: the candidates themselves, not some buzzwords like "elasticity."

Brandon Pressley is almost a caricature of the type of Democrat you need to run to be competitive in MS, campaigning as an even more socially conservative and practicing Christian than Jim Hood (who was always too ambiguous about his stances on some of those issues and had some authenticity issues in that regard), painting Reeves as part of a corrupt, out-of-touch 'ol'-boy' network which has destroyed the quality of life for working people in the state, and steering clear of any racial rhetoric/issues that would alienate the white voting base while going all in on a convincing brand of economic populism. Has it ever occurred to people that the actual reason Mississippi is usually "inelastic" in elections is precisely because Democrats don’t usually run candidates like Brandon Pressley? If MS were as inelastic as it’s made out to be, Espy wouldn’t have overperformed by that much and Hood wouldn’t have come within 5 points of beating Reeves (who was a stronger opponent in 2019 than he is now).

People meme about this, but it’s undeniable that social conservatism is a make-or-break area for Democrats in the Deep South and that there is in fact a large chunk of white voters who are very much waiting for a conservative Pressley-type Democrat to support against against an arrogant pol like Reeves who thinks he can get away with anything because of partisanship. Yes, Republicans usually don’t bleed white voters in the Deep South, but "when it rains, it pours" (as we saw in LA in 2015).

The path for Pressley is very clear and certainly real. Whether he’ll actually win is a different matter, but nobody should be writing him off because of some weird preconceptions about states and meaningless buzzwords which are proven wrong every cycle. Even a quick look at their campaign ads should tell you which campaign is acting more desperate — Reeves' only response to the state's myriad problems is literally "let’s stop trans athletes from participating in women's sports" (something that’s basically unheard of in MS):

https://mississippitoday.org/2023/07/12/brandon-presley-tate-reeves-tv-ads-governor/

It doesn’t get more out-of-touch than that. He’s doing nothing to change the perception that he is a sleazy, selfish pol putting himself above the state and only ever throwing red meat when it’s campaign season. This type of candidate really, really doesn’t play well in the Deep South.
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« Reply #3 on: August 13, 2023, 02:53:47 PM »

I agree in full with ever TNvolunteer said.


I believe that Presley is going to overperform expectations while Beshear underperforming it

It’s easy to forget that the polling conducted by the Hood campaign showed them ahead (narrowly) throughout 2019... until the impeachment proceedings against Trump overshadowed everything.

Quote
The poll said the impeachment inquiry was opposed by a 56% to 34% margin in Mississippi.

Hood campaign staffers said privately after the election that their internal polling showed the Democrat holding a slight lead throughout 2019. Hood’s internal polling also showed that he was viewed more favorably than Reeves. But a key is that the internal poll consistently showed that Trump was more favorable than the Mississippi politicians, including outgoing Gov. Phil Bryant.

As the impeachment inquiry intensified during the final days of the Mississippi gubernatorial campaign, Hood staffers said they could feel the election slipping away.

On that Friday night in Tupelo’s BancorpSouth Coliseum, the momentum for Reeves and the anger over the impeachment inquiry seemed palpable. And on Election Day, Reeves convincingly won the Tupelo area that was viewed as a Hood stronghold, helping to propel Reeves to a 5-point victory statewide.

https://mississippitoday.org/2023/08/06/could-gov-tate-reeves-benefit-again-from-trump-legal-woes/

In other words, the 2019 race was competitive but Republicans did get a late boost in all of KY/LA/MS (esp. the last two) because of impeachment backlash in deep-red states. This is also why JBE won by a narrower margin than expected in early/mid-2019. The environment wasn’t favorable to Democrats in those states and national Republicans did a good job nationalizing the MS race in particular (and are doing a much worse job this year).
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« Reply #4 on: October 26, 2023, 11:58:36 AM »

To be fair, my understanding is that Mississippi is on its way towards becoming competitive. It may not be there yet but it will happen eventually.

I don’t think Reeves losing would be a sign of MS becoming competitive. The JBE/Pressley model (running a practising pro-life Christian who focuses exclusively on kitchen-table issues and contrasts himself with the out-of-touch incumbent and corrupt local administration) does not work at the national level.

It’s basically a Phil Scott/Charlie Baker-situation. The Deep South (except GA) is not getting any less Republican any time soon.

The KY and VA races have been far more nationalized.
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« Reply #5 on: November 08, 2023, 11:34:14 AM »

The election gods have a cruel way of validating Atlas memes that I dismiss. 

First Laxalt loses by a Titanium Tilt D margin.

Now Reeves wins by the exact same margin as four years ago — it doesn’t get more inelastic than that!

Congrats, ShadowoftheWave.  
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« Reply #6 on: November 18, 2023, 12:44:56 AM »

Given the closeness of this race (my Toss-up rating looking less and less ridiculous as the margin narrows), it’s highly likely that Pressley would have won if Trump had been President. He ran a near-perfect campaign, but sharing a party label with Biden and national Ds being this toxic was too big a drag on him.

It does make Andy Beshear's performance look all the more impressive, but I strongly suspect turnout patterns favored Ds much more in KY than in MS.
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« Reply #7 on: November 22, 2023, 12:23:22 AM »

I don't get Pressley's loss. He was quite moderate.

Presley did insanely impressive, given that the Deep South has been trending away from Democrats post-Dobbs in every other election. Hats off for Presley, and MT Treasurer for being right while I was wrong.

Thank you — I predicted a narrow win for Pressley, so I can’t say I was on target even though I always thought the race was going to be close.

I think your and other people's point about the Deep South (minus GA) being more hostile to Democrats now than in 2015 was perfectly legitimate. JBE winning by double digits while Obama was in the teens with whites made me think Pressley could pull it off with Biden's numbers with whites in a similar range, but (a) these states are more Republican at a state level now than they were in 2015 (like in the case of Montana, the presidential topline often makes you lose sight of this), (b) Reeves was actually battle-tested and not caught asleep at the wheel like Vitter — goes to show you that these things make the difference even in supposedly safe states. And, well, he also lucked out — national Democrats complicated Hood's bid with the impeachment proceedings against Trump, and Biden's numbers being in the tank arguably tanked (sorry) Pressley.

I got KY wrong (Cameron +2) but I would have predicted a Beshear win if you had shown me the turnout numbers by county. It was a catastrophic underperformance on the part of Cameron which I really didn’t see coming. I think Cameron being this closely tied to McConnell may have had something to do with it, but it probably doesn’t explain all of it.

Looks like I nailed the governor races this year.

Well done — not easy getting off-year elections in particular right.   
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