Mississippi’s special Senate election was supposed to be a post-election snooze-fest. Mississippi is one of the most reliably Republican states and even if Republicans somehow found a way to blow it, the GOP was going to maintain the Senate majority anyway.
But, weirdly enough, Republicans are starting to worry about this race. Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (who was appointed to the seat earlier this year) recently said that she complimented a supporter by saying “if he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row”—which isn’t good in any context, but especially not in a state with a history of lynching. And she has now followed that up with a couple more rough news cycles. Hyde-Smith is running against Mike Espy, a former Agriculture secretary and Mississippi congressman and probably one of the best candidates Democrats had in Mississippi.
So should Republicans be worried? Is Hyde-Smith in trouble?
To get a handle on this question I’m going to talk through (1) what type of a red state Mississippi is; (2) what an upset or narrow win would look like demographically; and (3) how likely an Espy win is.
Mississippi Is a Specific Type of Red State
In a national environment where Trump’s approval rating has been hovering in the mid to low 40s, it’s possible for Republicans to lose in red states. In 2018, they won Senate races in Missouri, Indiana, North Dakota, and Texas and lost in West Virginia and Montana. But not all red states are the same, and Mississippi’s specific makeup matters.
Mississippi is what we’d call an inelastic state. There typically aren’t tons of swing-y voters in inelastic states—both parties have solid bases, and they’re able to get those bases to vote for them at predictable rates in most elections. For example, in Mississippi, the Republican percentage of the vote ranged from 55.3 percent to 59.4 percent and the Democratic vote percentage ranged from 39.8 percent to 43.8 percent between 2000 and 2016. That’s a pretty small range of outcomes considering the country experienced everything from a Democratic landslide (2008) to a solid Republican win (2004) during that interval.
In fact, Mississippi is one the least elastic states in the country
The vertical axis measures elasticity (the standard deviation of the presidential vote from 2000 to 2016) and the horizontal axis shows the GOP’s vote share in 2016. Mississippi’s position in the bottom right part of the graphic shows that it’s both inelastic and red—that is, Republicans usually win by a solid, stable margin. And their wins often follow a predictable geographic pattern.
This series of maps (two-party presidential vote share, with colors top-coded) shows that both parties have relatively predictable geographic coalitions in national elections. And, unsurprisingly for those who know something about Southern politics, this map lines up well with racial maps. Mississippi is an inelastic state mostly because Republicans can count on winning massive margins with white voters, Democrats can count on winning huge margins with black voters, and that settles out to a predictable GOP advantage in many key races.
This probably sounds familiar to people who followed the Alabama Senate special election last year. Alabama is, like Mississippi, a red state that’s usually somewhat inelastic. To be sure, there are some real differences between Mississippi and Alabama—Mississippi has the highest percentage of black residents of any state and is by some measures more rural than Alabama. But, despite those differences, the formula for a Mississippi upset has a lot in common with the Alabama formula.
Ingredients for an Upset
The first requirement for any upset is a credible challenger and Espy fits the bill. It’s not impossible to imagine Espy doing better than other statewide Democrats by increasing black turnout, persuading some white voters and running at a time when Trump’s low job approval might depress turnout among the Trump-ian base.
We can put some hard numbers on this. The New York Times Upshot estimated that whites were 60 percent of the 2012 Mississippi electorate and African-Americans were 38 percent. Despite African-American turnout being high nationally that year, Mississippi was still red. That’s because Obama won about 93 percent of the African-American vote but only 13 percent of the white vote. If Espy managed to get a similar racial breakdown to 2012 (which isn’t guaranteed) and gets roughly 25 percent of the white vote and 93 percent of the black vote, he would be at about 50 percent of the overall vote. I would guess that Espy would feel more comfortable if he could pull around 30 percent of the white vote because that would allow African-American turnout to decrease from the 2012 mark and still put him above the 50 percent mark.
Either way, those are the contours of what Espy’s numbers would have to be for him to win.
So Will It Actually Happen?
But that scenario probably won’t happen. An Espy win is plausible, but Hyde-Smith is still a better bet.
Hyde-Smith has shown herself to be a less-than-great candidate over the last couple weeks, but she’s not Roy Moore. And Doug Jones, who was one of the better Democratic recruits of the last few years, only managed to beat Moore—one of the worst candidates to win a state-wide major party nomination in our lifetimes—by 1.6 points. Moreover, Senate races are typically nationalized and Trump’s approval rating is both higher nationally than it was in December 2017 and generally high in Mississippi.
Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much public polling in this race, so there’s not a good way to check whether that analysis matches the conditions on the ground. That being said, the polling that does exist seemed to show a solid lead for Hyde-Smith. She would have had to have taken a lot of damage to be behind at this point.
Given the available data, it seems like Hyde-Smith is still a solid favorite. All the major handicappers rate the race as either “Lean” or “Likely” Republican. I think that consensus is roughly right. This isn’t Utah’s Senate race, where Mitt Romney’s win probability was always something close to 100 percent. But it’s also not Arizona’s Senate race, which ended up getting really close as Election Day approached. Republicans are definitely in the driver’s seat here and are solid favorites, but it’d be malpractice to ignore this race and just assume that Espy has no chance of winning.
