Republican incumbent wins Senate runoff in Mississippi

Appointee is first woman elected to Congress from state.

Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Republican who was appointed to the Senate this year, defeated Mike Espy, a Democrat and former congressman, in a special election runoff on Tuesday after neither candidate won a majority on Election Day.

Hyde-Smith is the first woman elected to Congress from Mississippi.

The election was held to fill the seat of Senator Thad Cochran, who retired earlier this year for health reasons.

A spokeswoman for the sec- retary of state’s office, Leah Rupp Smith, said observers from the office were seeing “steady but slow” turnout the first few hours, but the pace picked up late in the day, with estimates that 30 to 40 percent of registered voters cast ballots.

Espy cast his ballot at a Baptist church in the Jackson suburb of Ridgeland, while Hyde- Smith voted at a volunteer fire department in Brookhaven, about 55 miles south of Jackson.

Espy kept to a theme he’s emphasized repeatedly: The black Democrat said he’d be a senator for all of Mississippi. He said that to win, he couldn’t just rely on Afri- can-American voters. He needed white voters, as well.

“I don’t talk to them as white voters. I talk to them as Mississippians — Mississippi young people who want to reduce their debt coming out of college, Mississippi young people who want to stay in this state, and not go to Atlanta and Dallas to get a good job,” Espy said after voting.

Hyde-Smith hugged supporters at her precinct.

“We have worked very hard, and we feel very good,” Hyde-Smith said.

Mississippi’s past of racist violence became a theme after a video showed Hyde-Smith praising a supporter in early November by saying, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”

She said it was “an exaggerated expression of regard.” More than a week after the video’s release, she said she apologized to “anyone that was offended by my comments,” but also said the remark was used as a “weapon” against her.

Hyde-Smith was seen in another video talking about making voting difficult for “liberal folks,” and a photo circulated of her wearing a replica Confederate military hat during a 2014 visit to Beauvoir, a beachside museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, that was the last home of Confeder- ate president Jefferson Davis.

Critics said Hyde-Smith’s comments and Confederate regalia showed callous indif- ference in a state with a 38 percent black population.

But Elizabeth Galling house, 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.

“Somany 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.”

Espy, who was agriculture secretary when Bill Clinton was in the White House, resigned the Cabinet post in 1994 amid a special counsel investigation that accused him of improperly accepting gifts.

He was tried and acquitted on 30 corruption charges, but the Mississippi Republican Party ran an ad this year that called Espy “too corrupt for the Clintons” and “too liberal for Mississippi.”

Espy said he refused to accept plea deals because “I was so not guilty, I was innocent.”

AP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., speaks during a rally with President Donald Trump in Biloxi on Monday night. She defeated Democrat Mike Espy in a runoff Tuesday to win the seat she was appointed to earlier this year.