Cindy Hyde-Smith won Tuesday’s Mississippi Special Election. As of late Tuesday night, she was ahead by 9 points and it looks like she’ll end up winning by a mid-to-high single digits when all the votes are counted. I have three major takeaways from this race:
(1) Candidates Matter, But So Does Partisanship
Cindy Hyde-Smith took some damage heading into Election Day—she said that she would attend a “public hanging” if a supporter invited her (it was meant as a compliment to the supporter, but it was a tone-deaf remark given the state’s history with lynching) and followed those remarks up with a few more rough, racialized news cycles.
The combination of these remarks and the still-Democratic national environment (as measured by Trump’s approval rating) likely hurt Hyde-Smith, but the redness of Mississippi kept her from being in much real danger. In 2016, Trump won the state by 18 points in 2016, Romney won it by 12 points in 2012 and McCain won it by 13 in 2008. Hyde-Smith underperformed these candidates and Mike Espy, the Democratic candidate, overperformed both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—but Mississippi ended up doing its normal thing and electing a Republican Senator by a solid margin.
(2) Inelastic States Can Stretch—and This Isn’t the Last Time That Might Matter
Mississippi is a classic case of an inelastic, racially polarized state (almost all the black voters vote for the Democrat, almost all white voters typically vote for the Republican and the Republican ends up winning) where the Republican wins by a predictable margin even in a wide variety of economic and political situations.
But the margin in Mississippi, as well as the results of last year’s special Senate election in Alabama, suggest that inelastic states are more elastic than we might think. If Republicans nominate a problematic candidate such as Hyde-Smith (or a truly horrible one like Roy Moore), voters react negatively. Moreover, changes in turnout can also move the needle. I’ll need to analyze the data from Mississippi more before coming to firm conclusions about exactly what happened there, but it’s worth noting that Doug Jones won in Alabama partially because turnout was weak among Trumpian Republicans and strong among African-Americans.
This all might seem a little academic, but it’s worth finessing our concepts around inelasticity sometime soon. Louisiana and Mississippi—two typically inelastic states—will be holding gubernatorial elections in 2019 and Georgia (a somewhat different deep-Southern state) is already on the Democratic wish list.
(3) Trump Has More Breathing Room in the Senate
The Trumpian wing of the Senate GOP is stronger. For much of 2017 and 2018, the GOP maintained a fragile edge in the Senate—defections by Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, or the late John McCain could (and did) scuttle legislation.
But Trump is now in a much better position in the Senate. Some of the Senators who were most free to oppose him are gone. Flake and Corker are no longer in the Senate (though I don’t think that either of them fully used the freedom and leverage that retirement provided). Corker has been replaced by Marsha Blackburn, a Trump ally. Mitt Romney is entering the Senate as Flake leaves, but it’s not clear exactly how Romney will respond to Trump over the next two to six years. McCain is also gone, and it’s unclear what’s going to happen to Susan Collins in the 2020 cycle. Hyde-Smith’s win gives the GOP 53 seats. That means that the GOP can lose couple of votes (Collins and more) without losing the majority.
All of that might not end up being a enormously important for governing, of course. With the loss of the House, it’s going to be hard for Trump to get legislation passed. But the GOP seat count is a big deal for medium-term control of the Senate. The 2020 GOP Senate map is tilted against the Republicans—it’s easy to imagine Democrats netting a couple seats next time around even in a non-landslide national environment. The GOP now has padding that could allow them to keep the majority even if they take some losses in 2020.
