Mississippi senator Thad Cochran announced Monday that he would be retiring as of April 1 due to health issues. Cochran’s retirement will trigger a special election for November 2018—a nonpartisan primary that, if no candidate gets above 50 percent, will go to a runoff.
A special election in a deep red state where a far right Republican candidate could join the fray might not sound like fun for the GOP. In fact, it probably sounds uncomfortably similar to last year’s Alabama special Senate election, where Republicans nominated an extremely problematic candidate who lost the general election to a Democrat in a deeply red, Southern state.
But Republicans currently have reasons to be optimistic about holding the seat.
One reason is Mississippi—it’s an inflexibly red state.
This graphic shows the Republican lean of the state (as measured by the results of the 2016 election) and the state’s “elasticity.” Elasticity is basically a measure of how much national political conditions (e.g., the recession that helped Obama win a first term or the solid economic news that helped Reagan win a second one) do or don’t move a state. Here that’s measured as the standard deviation of the state’s presidential results in the last few cycles.
Mississippi sits near the bottom and toward the right—indicating that it’s a red state hasn’t jerked right or left in recent presidential elections despite considerable shifts in the national popular vote. That’s partially because the state has racially polarized voting: Republicans typically win a supermajority of white voters, Democrats win a supermajority of black voters and that math lets the GOP win regardless of what’s happening nationally. Even in Democratic wave elections, Republicans senators are often safe. In 2008, both Roger Wicker and Cochran withstood the Democratic wave, winning their seats by 23 points and 10 points, respectively. Similarly, in the 2006 Democratic wave, Trent Lott managed to beat his Democratic candidate Erik Fleming by nearly 30 points.
Demographics alone don’t guarantee a GOP win (see Moore’s loss in 2017), but they do help. And there’s no reason to assume the Republicans will nominate someone as uniquely horrible as Moore.
The dream scenario for Republicans would be the quick emergence of a consensus candidate. It’s possible to imagine a scenario where Gov. Phil Bryant nominates a heavy hitter as interim senator (potentially himself), that this candidate scares off some competition, builds a solid lead and either wins in November or in a runoff election. A consensus candidate in Mississippi would likely look different than a consensus candidate in other states. In the 2016 Mississippi Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump got 47 percent of the vote, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (who performed well with evangelical Christians and ideological conservatives) won 36 percent and Florida senator Marco Rubio and Ohio governor John Kasich (the preferred candidates of many upscale conservatives and moderates, respectively) got a combined 14 percent of the vote. So a mainstream Mississippi Republican might sound more like a blend of Trump and Cruz – a Republican Populist and a very conservative Christian – than a suburban Republican.
The GOP dream scenario isn’t guaranteed.
It’s possible that a huge number of Republicans rush into the race and split the vote. A feeding frenzy among more traditional Republicans could allow a potentially problematic candidate like Chris McDaniel (who is currently running against Roger Wicker in the state’s other senate primary but is keeping his options open) to win enough votes to make it to the runoff and narrowly lose to a Democratic candidate. Mississippi is a red state, but it’s not red enough to rule out a scenario like this.
There are numerous scenarios between these GOP dreams and nightmares, and it’s easy to see how the GOP could win in many of them. For example, imagine that there’s a crowded GOP primary, but McDaniel stays in the race against Wicker and a not-problematic Republican makes it to the runoff. That’s not a perfect scenario for the GOP, but they’d still likely win the seat. More broadly, Mississippi is a highly red state—in most normal elections, it votes for the Republican.
At this point, I agree with Sabato’s Crystal Ball that this race is “Likely Republican” with room to change as the primary field takes shape. This isn’t the safest seat Republicans have this cycle. Utah, Mississippi’s other senate race, Nebraska and Wyoming all appear to be better bets for the GOP. But it’s not nearly as competitive as Arizona, Nevada or some of the other races of this cycle.
