The 2020 election saw several competitive, southern Senate races. As fall began and Election Day creeped closer, polling was tight in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
But there was another competitive race hiding outside the Democratic Party’s consciousness for most of the election cycle. In ruby-red Mississippi, Democrat Mike Espy overcame a twenty-five-point polling deficit, narrowing his race with Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith to a one-point contest. For the first time in recent memory, Mississippi Democrats dared to dream of statewide office.
Espy and Hyde-Smith were no strangers. After Governor Phil Bryant appointed Hyde-Smith to the Senate in 2018, Espy launched—as his team described to me—a last-minute and underfunded bid in the ensuing special election. Despite Espy’s experience as a three-term congressman and the first Black secretary of agriculture, he couldn’t beat Hyde-Smith after forcing a runoff.
Espy’s 2020 campaign—which I joined as a senior research associate—did not suffer the same issues as his 2018 attempt. He filed early to run and assembled a team of experienced operatives. He raised $15.7 million from over 200,000 donors, historic numbers for any statewide race in Mississippi, especially from a Democrat. Meanwhile, Hyde-Smith raised a quarter of that, and less than any Senator seeking re-election. In one filing period, Espy outraised her forty-five to one.
Espy’s campaign and the Mississippi Democratic Party (MSDP) put this fundraising advantage—and their seven-to-one paid media edge—to work. They ran television ad after television ad, some positive about Espy’s character and many negative about Hyde-Smith’s. They attacked her for supporting a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. They criticized her refusal to hold town halls. They condemned her numerous votes to cut vital state funding. And they highlighted her ranking as the least effective and most Trump-loyal senator—all to assert that Mississippi deserved better.
Espy’s statewide tour included over one hundred COVID-compliant events. As his campaign reached its end, Espy pushed harder with a five-day get-out-the-vote bus tour. All the while, Hyde-Smith refused to debate Espy, ducked media questions, and only allowed her staunchest supporters into rallies.
“For [her campaign], there was a danger to including media or extending invites to people who might ask reasonable questions or demand accountability,” Espy Communications Director Kendall Witmer argued.
Meanwhile, the MSDP unleashed a grassroots organizing campaign never before seen from a Mississippi Democrat. Volunteers and staff knocked on almost 600,000 doors, focusing on infrequent voters who had avoided the ballot box since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.
The MSDP also launched a voter suppression hotline that was staffed by dozens of lawyers, paralegals, and volunteers. According to MSDP Director Jared Turner, the initiative was better funded than any prior attempt from Democrats in Mississippi. The effort sought to give Espy a fair chance in a hotbed of voter suppression, and received hundreds of calls.
Beyond finances, the 2020 cycle seemed perfect for Espy. He and his campaign deftly “met the moment,” as Espy put it, on issues of race and health care. As police violence and racial justice captured the political discourse like never before, Espy spoke about his experiences in the civil-rights-era South. During speeches and in paid media, he retold the challenges of integrating his public high school, from teachers blasting him with fire extinguishers to his peers hurling the n-word at him.
Meanwhile, Hyde-Smith recited “law and order” talking points as she dodged questions on her own history of racial insensitivity. In 2014, Hyde-Smith posted an image on Facebook, wearing a Confederate soldier’s cap with rifle and all. Four years later, she said she would attend a public hanging. Espy labeled her “an anachronism, a throwback to the past.”
In March, the Madison County Board of Supervisors hired Espy; there, he developed the county’s COVID response plan, finalizing the policy just nine days after Mississippi reported its first case. That same week, Hyde-Smith said the pandemic would be over in “a couple of weeks.”
As the state’s CARES Act money ran dry in June, Espy’s nonprofit—Hope Credit Union—facilitated nearly one thousand Paycheck Protection Program loans to struggling employers unable to obtain loans elsewhere. Meanwhile, Hyde-Smith repeatedly encouraged gutting public health guidelines and pushed to reopen businesses.
In the fall, Espy held socially distant campaign events and called for statewide mask mandates and principled leadership in Washington. All the while, Hyde-Smith was in the Capitol obstructing relief efforts with her Republican Senate colleagues. The senator even took an August recess despite writing an op-ed castigating senatorial “quitting” just a year prior.
Even before COVID-19 took full grip of the American zeitgeist, health care sat firmly in the center of Espy’s campaign, and for good reason. Mississippi ranked dead last in health system performance, had the fifth-highest rate of uninsured residents, and an ailing hospital system suffering from perennial closures.
Like Democrat David Baria, who ran in Mississippi’s other 2018 Senate race, Espy argued that expanding Medicaid in Mississippi would alleviate much of the state’s health problems. This expansion would cover 210,000 more residents, cutting the uninsured rate by almost 75 percent. Over just one decade, the state would receive an estimated $11.1 billion in additional federal funds and billions more in hospital reimbursements.
And this wasn’t a secret among voters. Before Espy began campaigning, nearly two-thirds of Mississippians supported the initiative.
“I want to be the health care senator,” Espy preached from the stump. “I am running to move Mississippi forward.”
Yet on November 3, Cindy Hyde-Smith was victorious, finishing with ten percent more of Mississippi’s largest vote total to date. The tight polls were all invalidated as President Donald Trump turned out droves of ardent supporters.
“Trump, for whatever reason, turned out these voters who can’t or won’t be measured,” Witmer concluded.
During the final weeks of the cycle, Hyde-Smith did her best to remain composed in the face of mounting pressure. By staying out of the spotlight, she allowed Espy to gain ground, but Mississippi GOP strategists were right; in the end, it didn’t matter. As they predicted, Mississippi conservatives would show up to vote for Trump no matter what. And if they were voting for Trump, they might as well vote for his loyal servant too.
But the result is misleading—an ill-fitting headline to a historic Democratic effort.
Mike Espy shined on a night of countrywide Democratic losses, receiving a higher percentage of Republican crossover votes than any Democratic Senate candidate other than Steve Bullock of Montana. In three Mississippi counties, the winning ticket was split Trump/Espy. He inspired a record-breaking Black turnout, receiving more votes in Mississippi than Obama ever did.
“[It] was a huge, ginormous step for Mississippi Democrats,” Witmer noted. “We can’t stop doing the investment that’s needed in the South.”
“The bridge is three-fourths finished,” Espy explained. “But you gotta keep building.”
If Democrats ever want to win statewide office in Mississippi, they cannot give up. They must continue organizing, raising money, and proving viability. They must continue knocking on doors, registering voters, and explaining to downtrodden Mississippians how a vote for the right leader can change everything.
Espy Campaign Manager Joe O’Hern adds that “It got better because a group of us tried,” and, at the end of the day, “You need people to try.”
But this organizing cannot come only when elections approach. To change the political dynamics of the state, a multi-faceted, year-round effort is needed—one that spans multiple cycles. In Georgia, it took eight years of organizing, fundraising, and tenacious leadership from Stacey Abrams to carry the state from red to purple.
However, it may prove even harder for the Magnolia State to find such success. Mississippi is the poorest state in the country; thus, as Turner explains, “Mississippi doesn’t have an internal fundraising base . . . we don’t have a lot of money in Mississippi.” Herein lies the biggest challenge for state Democrats: persuading Washington insiders, wealthy PACs, and campaign committees that they are viable contenders who deserve political infrastructure investment.
Even as polling tightened to a five-point race in August, and even as Espy outraised Hyde-Smith nearly three to one in quarter two, national Democrats took little notice. Only after a week of campaign social media posts admonishing Democratic leadership did Espy receive a meager portion of the national fundraising tsunami following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “If we had not done what we had done [on social media], we would not have gotten any of that,” O’Hern claimed.
But Mississippi Democrats cannot pray for the death of a Supreme Court justice and an ensuing fundraising deluge each cycle. At some point, they must prove viability.
“It’s a proverbial catch-twenty-two,” Espy explained. “In order to get the attention of [national Democrats], they have to consider you as viable. And they can’t consider you as viable if you don’t have the resources.”
Mississippi is likely many years away from proving this viability. Hundreds of thousands of eligible adults are not registered to vote and remain unengaged in politics. Moreover, Mississippi has yet to see the demographic changes experienced by other competitive southern states, including an influx of young, Black voters into larger cities. And running an experienced candidate with deep in-state ties such as Espy may not be possible each cycle.
Mississippi Democrats and national leadership must shift their attention from candidates (many of whom lost) to states, their infrastructure, and their people. Democrats started this work in Georgia—which helped them win the 2020 presidential race and the 2021 Senate runoffs—and must continue this work throughout the South. Senior officials must deprioritize short-term success and begin investing in long-term voter relationships.
Espy gave Mississippi Democrats a real chance in 2020 and well into the future. But as the fight goes on, Mississippians must resist demoralization and urge Democratic leaders to join them in building out infrastructure and civically engaging voters.
If they do, Mississippi will flip. As Reverend William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign observed, “Mississippi isn’t a red state, it’s an under-organized state.”
