A Fox News article helpfully reminded everyone Monday that “the key factor will be turnout” in the Mississippi Senate race. Like much of the rest of the media, even Fox News is portraying the outcome in the deep red state as a cliffhanger.
It won’t be. Though the Fox News article said Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is expected to “squeak out a win,” she’ll likely beat Democrat Mike Espy and it will be by a sizable margin.
CNN on Tuesday morning called the race “potentially competitive,” even while admitting that there is virtually no polling to suggest that.
Instead, CNN, Fox News, and others are hanging their assumption on the controversy earlier this month when Hyde-Smith was seen on video joking to a group of her supporters, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” (The “he” was identified as cattle rancher Colin Hutchinson, who Hyde-Smith is apparently familiar with.)
Espy is black, which matters a lot to the media, and so now this race is “competitive.”
But the vote in the runoff, which takes place Tuesday, is a statewide race and President Trump won Mississippi in 2016 by 18 points.
And though the public is supposed to believe this will be a close one, the evidence isn’t there.
Hyde-Smith is in a runoff not because Espy has dazzled the state with an unlikely brilliant Democratic campaign. She’s in a runoff because twice-failed candidate Chris McDaniel, who was endorsed by the Tea Party Express in his 2014 bid, challenged her in the primary, splitting the Republican vote so that none of the three got a majority.
Hyde-Smith got 41.3 percent, according to RealClearPolitics. McDaniel got 16.4 percent. Espy, the only real Democrat in the race, got 40.9 percent. Nobody has made the argument that Espy can significantly improve on that 40.9 percent in the runoff, considering the top two Republicans combined for 57.7 percent.
The Washington Post said Monday that “public and private polls have measured a boost in voter enthusiasm for Democratic Senate candidate Mike Espy,” though the paper didn’t care to inform their poor readers which polls it had seen or even provide exact numbers on them.
In that spirit, using my own private poll (math), I’m calling it for Hyde-Smith.
