A black Democratic senator in Ole Miss?
The sleeper race to watch this November is in the unlikeliest of places — my home state of Mississippi. Former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy has a shot at becoming the first black U.S. senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction, in a seat opened up by the retirement of Sen. Thad Cochran. Espy is announcing his candidacy today.
I know what you’re thinking: “Bless her heart, but Mississippi is not electing a black Democrat to the U.S. Senate.” Espy, though, has pulled it off before, winning 40% of the white vote in 1990 and making history to become the first black man since Reconstruction to serve the state in the House of Representatives.
He did it by appealing to the shared economic interests of middle class and low-income voters across racial lines, an appeal he and other Democrats can make in multiracial states today. It’s a formula that has newfound power in any state, including New York, that struggles with education, health care and the economy.
Take Mississippi. It ranks 50th in health care quality, 50th in infant mortality rate, 50th in healthcare affordability and 49th in obesity rate (meaning, it’s the second most overweight). I’m a proud product of Ole Miss, but for most people my home state lags far behind on education: last in national reading scores, 48th in math scores, and 49th in college readiness.
Our economy is anemic (48th), little new investment is coming into the state (48th again), and our infrastructure is poor (49th). Not surprisingly, people are voting with their feet: Mississippi is among the national leaders in net migration out of the state.
While Mississippians like to think of themselves as far removed from Washington, the truth is that the federal government is a bigger factor in the economics of the state than almost anywhere else. One-third of the Mississippi GDP is direct federal expenditures, the highest proportion in the country. And the state gets back five dollars in federal spending for every dollar it sends to Washington, the largest taxspend ratio of any state.
In pure dollars and cents, federal elections matter in Mississippi like nowhere else.
When Republican politicians in Mississippi want to distract voters from the dismal economic status of the state and its dependence on federal largesse, they follow an old playbook: splitting the vote along racial lines. It usually works.
In 1988, in his first run for Congress, Espy won 12% of the white vote in a congressional district with a black majority. Two years later, Espy rewrote his own playbook and increased white support to 40%. (I worked on his campaign and went to Washington as his press secretary.)
He did it by talking to white and black churchgoers, farmers, teachers, small-business owners. They often met separately — similar to many other states in the country, even today. But the concerns were always the same. Anxiety about jobs. Fear about drugs. A longing for better educational opportunities. More help for farms.
There was no email or microtargeting back then. He just went and talked and listened — then acted. In 1990, Espy helped expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, an important benefit to low- and moderate-income families, black and white, in his district. The interesting thing is that Espy didn’t need 40% of white votes to win — he was successful without them in his first election — but he wanted that support because it made his representation that much stronger.
In New York, my home now, and in other parts of the country, one rarely sees that kind of crossracial voting in a Congressional district. If you can make it happen in Mississippi, well, you can make it happen anywhere.
My family still lives in the house my father built with his own hands in Laurel, Miss., in the 1950s, and our neighbors are well represented among the 58% of Mississippi voters who pulled the lever for Trump in 2016.
Mississippi is among the toughest places for Democrats to win statewide elections today. Republicans will wave the Confederate flag. (That’s easy to do — it’s part of the state flag.) They will stand in front of statues of Robert E. Lee. Likewise, some Democrats will want to talk about Stormy Daniels, White House firings and Facebook bots.
If Espy ignores those frames and stays focused on jobs, health care and education, he can create a winning coalition that makes history, again. Other Democrats, take note.