In Mississippi, Democratic odds improve but stay long

ANALYSIS

JACKSON,Miss.— Does Hillary Clinton really have a chance of winning Mississippi’s six electoral votes? Not likely.

Are Democrats more competitive in the Magnolia State’s presidential contest than they used to be? Maybe.

Will Clinton fare better against Donald Trump in Mississippi than in every neighboring state? The prognosticators all think so.

This is the problem facing Democrats. Mississippians have voted for a Democratic presidential candidate just once in the last 60 years, when Georgian Jimmy Carter edged out Gerald Ford by less than 15,000 votes in 1976. Before that, the last Democratic winner was Adlai Stevenson in his failed 1956 campaign against Dwight Eisenhower. That year was the last gasp of the Democratic Solid South, the 20th time in 21 presidential elections that Mississippi had given its votes to its ancestral party.

President Barack Obama performed pretty well for a Democrat in the state as he won re-election in 2012, winning almost 44 percent of votes. That was a slightly smaller share of the vote than Bill Clinton won during his re-election campaign in 1996.

Some of that improvement stems from the gradual increase in the share of African-Americans making it to the polls.

“Black voters have become steady voters, and they’re quite strong in that regard,” said David Bositis, a political scientist and pollster in Washington, D.C., who has studied African-American voting behavior nationwide for years.

The black voters who came to the polls in 2012 were overwhelmingly for Obama. An exit poll conducted for The Associated Press and other news organizations found 96 percent of AfricanAmerican voters supported his re-election.

Looking at predictions of seven forecasting groups, Mississippi is rated less of a lock for Republicans than Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee or Alabama. The Magnolia State looks a little more Republican than Georgia, which is hailed as the next target after Virginia and North Carolina for Democrats in the South.

The flip side of that coin, though, is Mississippi may have the most racially polarized electorate in the nation. The same exit poll showed that nearly nine in 10 white voters went for Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. Racial solidarity could be Trump’s biggest plus in the state.

“There will be a lot of people in Mississippi who will like the elements of white supremacy, or white nationalism, that creeps into his message, or his supporters’ messages,” Bositis said.

Democrats can look to various options to close what was a 75,000vote gap. They could, for example, try to peel off more highly educated voters. In Mississippi, they were Romney’s strongest supporters, but some polls this year have showed Clinton leading among voters with a college degree nationwide.

Over the long term, population trends are quite positive for the Democrats. Romney rang up huge margins among people older than 65 in 2012, winning nearly 80 percent of those votes among a group that’s 75 percent white. Romney did much more poorly among younger voters in Mississippi. The youngest cohort of potential voters, residents aged 18 to 24, are only 54 percent white in Mississippi.

It may be 2020 or later before Democrats have any real chance in the state. Trump, in fact, may be shoring up his strength in Mississippi. A March poll by MasonDixon Polling and Research showed Trump up only 46 percent to 43 percent versus Clinton. Late last month, news organization FiveThirtyEight had given Clinton as much as a one-third chance of winning the state.

But as of Friday, FiveThirtyEight rated Trump as having an 84 percent chance of winning Mississippi.