There are no guarantees in politics, but Joe Nosef feels pretty confident in his prediction regarding the May 12 special election for Mississippi’s open congressional seat.
“A Republican is gonna win,” says Nosef. “The question is, which Republican is it going to be?”
You might expect Nosef, as the chairman of the Mississippi Republican party, to say that. But it’s not just partisan bluster. Though there are no party identifications on the special election ballot, of the 13 candidates vying to represent the state’s First Congressional District, and all but one of them are Republicans. (The top two vote-getters will most likely proceed to a June 2 runoff). The lone Democrat, Walter Zinn, got in the race at the last minute, and while Democrats have represented the First as recently as 2011, Mississippi has grown increasingly friendly to the GOP. Mitt Romney won 62 percent of the vote in the district, which has a R+16 tilt. Republican Alan Nunnelee won a third term in November with 68 percent support.
It was shocking and sudden when, just three months after his landslide victory, Nunnelee died. The congressman had undergone surgery and chemotherapy to successfully treat a brain tumor in 2014, but a new mass struck harder and more quickly. By January, he was too ill to travel to Washington, so a federal judge in Mississippi swore him into office. Nunnelee died in his home on February 6, at the age of 56.
Not long after Nunnelee’s death, the field to replace him began to take shape, with one Republican after another announcing their candidacies. Among the candidates from Nunnelee’s hometown of Tupelo are Trent Kelly, the district attorney who snagged former Nunnelee campaign manager Morgan Baldwin, and Nancy Collins, who holds the same state senate seat that Nunnelee once had. The only candidate from Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi, is Quentin Whitwell, a former Jackson city council member who moved up to Oxford and into the district just last year.
At the moment, the two strongest Republicans in the race are Mike Tagert and Boyce Adams. Tagert, 44, is one of the state’s three transportation commissioners, the only elected office he’s ever held. Sam Hall, the political correspondent at the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, says the powerful political operation of former governor Haley Barbour is “expected” to coalesce behind Tagert. He technically lives just a couple miles from the district line in Starkville, the location of Ole Miss rival Mississippi State. A graduate of Millsaps College and Mississippi State, Tagert served in the Marines from 1988 to 1994, and later worked for transportation and business development groups in Northern Mississippi.
First elected in a special election in 2011, Tagert is just the second Republican on the commission and the first from the northern district. The position has given him the visibility and fundraising prowess to be a top competitor for Nunnelee’s seat. Despite Tagert not living within the district lines, he says he knows the area and its constituents well. “I have represented all 22 counties in the district as transportation commissioner,” he says. That’s a built-in base, another advantage for Tagert.
But the position has given Tagert’s opponents some ammunition. Last year, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal reported that Tagert suggested the state should consider a 5 cent-per-gallon increase on the fuel tax, which currently sits at 18.4 cents a gallon. The unhappy choice, Tagert argued, was between a tax increase and failing to maintain Mississippi’s roads and bridges. According to the paper, Tagert said “The only thing worse than a tax increase is to irresponsibly fail to maintain” roads and bridges.
In an interview, Tagert insists he’s not for a federal gas tax increase. “That’s not something we’ve ever proposed,” he says.
The untimely death of Nunnelee has made for an odd quirk in Tagert’s candidate status: Like many other state officials running for Nunnelee’s seat, he is up for reelection to in November, and had filed to run again for the transportation commission. If Tagert loses the House race, he’ll be able to still run for reelection to the commission.
Tagert’s stiffest competition for the House seat is Boyce Adams, a 30-year-old businessman from Columbus, in the district’s southeastern corner. A graduate of Vanderbilt (where, full disclosure, he and I were fraternity brothers), Adams owns and runs a bank accounting software firm while serving as a vice president at his father’s related company, BankTEL. He’s also a commercial pilot.
He may be young, but Adams is already in his second run for office. The first came in 2011, when as the Republican nominee he lost to the incumbent Democrat for a seat on the state public service commission. Adams has been around Republican circles in Mississippi and Washington, including a stint at the George W. Bush White House.
Adams is a savvy political player. It’s assumed, as Sam Hall reports, he’ll have tacit support from current Republican governor Phil Bryant, who isn’t publicly endorsing any candidate. In the past, Bryant has contracted Adams to fly the governor around the state for unofficial business, though Bryant’s office says he has not done so since Adams entered the House race. Among those advising his campaign are veteran GOP pollster Ed Goeas, who also advises Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Adams was also the first candidate in Mississippi up with TV ads, launching a thirty-second spot in early March that coincided with his entry into the race.
Looking at Adams’s first ad alongside Tagert’s (released a few weeks later), it’s hard to see any ideological distinctions. Both spots focus on their respective candidates “values,” and both Tagert and Adams—not to mention the other candidates—are running as conservatives.
“Together,” Adams says at the end of his ad, “we can show Washington that Mississippi still believes in conservative values.”
“Growing up in Mississippi and serving in the Marines taught me about honor and hard work. These are the values Mary Love and I are teaching our kids,” says Tagert in his ad, vowing to vote to repeal Obamacare and cut taxes.
What may be more important than what the candidates say is that they’re able to say them often on TV. With a shortened campaign season (the filing deadline was March 27), the fight for the top two spots in a crowded field to reach a runoff will hinge on having good name identification. None of the top-tier candidates are from DeSoto County in the state’s northwest corner, which is the most populous in the district and a growing Memphis suburb. That means campaigns will be spending plenty of money in the Memphis media market.
What’s not expected is a replay of the dynamics that made last year’s GOP Senate primary one of the most brutal campaigns in Mississippi history. The race between establishment-backed incumbent Thad Cochran and Tea Party upstart Chris McDaniel became so heated that there’s little appetite for more of the rancor this time around. Joe Nosef, the state party chairman, says the memory of the late congressman will keep things collegial.
“Alan Nunnelee was a much beloved person,” Nosef says. “I think that has at least impacted the tone of the race.”
At least until the runoff.
