Hyde-Smith holds seat
Republican to return to U.S. Senate after Mississippi runoff.
JACKSON, Miss. — Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy HydeSmith, who was appointed to the office by Mississippi’s governor this year, has won the runoff to remain in office.
In Tuesday’s race, HydeSmith, 59, defeated Democrat Mike Espy, 64, a former U.S. agriculture secretary under President Bill Clinton.
The win allows HydeSmith to complete the final two years of Sen. Thad Cochran’s six-year term. Cochran retired in April, and Hyde-Smith was appointed to temporarily succeed him.
The win makes her the first woman elected to Congress from Mississippi. Republicans will now hold 53 of 100 Senate seats.
“We have bonded, we have persevered, we have gotten through things,” Hyde-Smith told a room of supporters just after receiving a congratulatory call from President Donald Trump. “The reason we won is because Mississippians know me, and they know my heart.”
Espy had hoped to become Mississippi’s first black senator since Reconstruction and its first Democrat in the Senate since 1982.
“While this is not the result we were hoping for, I am proud of the historic campaign we ran and grateful for the support we received across Mississippi,” Espy said to his supporters Tuesday night. “We built the largest grassroots organization our state has seen in a generation.”
The runoff was rocked by a video in which Hyde-Smith said of a supporter, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” A separate video showed her talking about “liberal folks” and making it “just a little more difficult” for them to vote.
The comments by HydeSmith, who is white, made Mississippi’s history of racist lynchings a theme of the runoff and spurred many black voters to return to the polls Tuesday.
The “public hanging” comment “really offended me,” said Charles Connley, 60, a black voter from Picayune.
Critics said Hyde-Smith’s comments showed callous indifference in a state with a 38 percent black population, and some corporate donors, including Walmart, requested refunds of campaign contributions to her.
But her supporters said the furor over her comments was overblown. They also stuck by her as a photo was circulated of her wearing a replica Confederate military hat during a 2014 visit to Beauvoir, the last home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
Elizabeth Gallinghouse, 84, from the coastal town of Diamondhead, voted for Hyde-Smith and said neither the “hanging” comments nor Hyde-Smith’s appearance in the Confederate hat bothered her.
“So many things are taken out of context,” Gallinghouse said. “The fact that she toured Jefferson Davis’s house — you or I could have done the same thing. They said, ‘Put this cap on. Hold this gun.’ It was a fun time. She wasn’t trying to send any messages.”
Espy’s campaign executed its turnout strategy, running ahead of its Nov. 6 vote in nearly every county. He was on track to carry all 25 of the state’s majority-black counties, most by bigger margins than he’d won in the first round. He also cut into traditional Republican margins in some suburban counties. In DeSoto County, on the outskirts of Memphis, he improved from 34 percent of the vote in the first round to 41 percent Tuesday.
That was not nearly enough to push past HydeSmith, as she racked up landslide margins in reliably conservative counties. Turnout was on track to nearly match the numbers from Nov. 6. That essentially doomed Espy, whose path to victory depended on many conservatives staying home.
Hyde-Smith was in her second term as Mississippi agriculture commissioner when Republican Gov. Phil Bryant appointed her to the Senate after Cochran retired due to health concerns.
Her strategy over the past few weeks was mostly to avoid the media and tie her-
self as closely as possible to Trump. She rode around in a bus dubbed the “MAGA Wagon” and touted how she voted with Trump “100 percent of the time.”
Shortly after the win Tuesday, Trump tweeted: “Congratulations to Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith on your big WIN in the Great State of Mississippi. We are all very proud of you!”
On Tuesday morning, as voters in a Jackson suburb entered Pleasant Grove Baptist Church to cast their ballots, most said they were unsatisfied with their choices.
Jerry Gullette, 58, the owner of several NAPA auto body shops, said he was voting for Hyde-Smith, but not enthusiastically.
“The only reason I’m voting for her is because she’s a Republican,” Gullette said. “She’s the best of the worst. I could do a better job than her, honestly.”
Information for this article was contributed by Emily Wagster Pettus, Jeff Amy and Janet McConnaughey of The Associated Press; and by Matt Viser and David Weigel of The Washington Post.