Mississippi Megathread 2023

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Forgive me if this has already been started somewhere - some interesting noise being made about this race. Brandon Presley is apparently making moves to run and Reeves is said to be vulnerable in the primary.

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If only MS could have a Beshear situation. I know it's a heavy lift but man, Reeves is just awful.

It's not crazy.  They have a traditional runoff for governor now, and that seems to favor Dems in today's world.  It's in the state constitution that the winner has to have a majority, so they can't just repeal it on the fly if Warnock wins by 10 tomorrow.

Do they still have that strange electoral college-like system or does this replace that?

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This seems significant?

Siena polled MS's GOP Primary voters, and 21% of them said they would vote for Presley in the GE. Would that be enough?

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23846468/ms-todaysiena-governor-06-23.pdf

Primaries in Mississippi are open, and it looks like Presley's support here is coming almost exclusively from self-ID independent/other voters (Democrat was not an option), non-white voters (18% of this sample - huge for a deep south Republican primary), and from Bennie Thompson's district. Given that there is recent history of high non-Republican participation in Mississippi GOP primaries and there being no seriously contested statewide Dem primaries this cycle, I'd say this is generally pretty believable given the players involved.

It's certainly an impressive number and implies that Presley is building up some serious strength but it's probably exaggerating his crossover appeal right now.

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The handwringing over Black voters here is a little misinformed - Shawn Wilson in Louisiana barely had a profile and spent very little with scant help from the DGA while Landry spent general election-levels of cash with real appeals to non-New Orleans Black voters. The Reeves/Presley spending and targeting dynamics are far more typical, though Presley is of course spending more than most MS Dems ever do.