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Mississippi has major elections every year, with no off years in between. And in all of
Now, the premise that “votes matter” might seem to some too elementary to merit further
But if you’re still reading, consider the fact that when we see articles about the state of a
political campaign, the topics are things like polling projections, fundraising results, personal
Meanwhile, we rarely see much written about what actual voters do in actual elections. A
little walk down history lane shows that Lt. Governor Tate Reeves’s path to victory is much
clearer than is Attorney General Jim Hood’s in this year’s race for the Governor’s Mansion. The
very strong likelihood is that Tate Reeves will be our state’s next governor if overall voter
The charts that follow here show the results in eleven elections for governor in our state
for the last forty years, from 1975 through 2015, the last year for which we know the final result.
Vote totals for the two major party candidates for each gubernatorial election during the
1
Chart 1
The facts graphically reflected here run counter to the conventional wisdom. Political
observers love to repeat the old saw that higher turnout favors Democratic candidates in our
Note that in the years in which voter turnout spiked upward, the Republican candidates
did very well. In fact, not only have Republicans consistently won the high turnout elections, but
the Republican candidate typically has won by a higher margin of votes in the years when
turnout increased.
Among the challenges for Democratic nominees for governor reflected on this chart is the
key fact that only three times in the past forty years have Democrats been able to muster at least
400,000 votes for their candidate. In fact, their highwater mark was in 1979, at 413,000 votes.
Since 1991, the only race for governor lost by the Republican nominee was in 1999. That
loss cannot be attributed to high turnout, but to low turnout. Chart 1 shows clearly that the
2
Democratic nominee was not the beneficiary of a surge of new voters that year. His total was
below the 400,000-vote level that has been the best Democrats could muster for forty years.
The Republican loss in 1999 is attributable to the fact that it was the only election year
since 1991 that the Republican nominee received fewer than 400,000 votes, and even then he
came within 9,000 votes of winning that election. Had overall turnout been a little bit higher,
Not only are the numbers on a per-election basis challenging for Democrats, but isolating
the Democratic results separately shows that the trendline for Democrats since 1975 is in free
fall:
Chart 2
And even if we throw out Democratic results from 2007, 2011 and 2015, on the premise
that those races were not sufficiently competitive to be instructive, the trendline for that party’s
3
Chart 3
Contrast those numbers with the corresponding trendlines for Republican candidates
If viewed in the context of the entire forty-year period, the trendline looks as though it
4
Chart 4
And even if adjusted by the removal of the noncompetitive races of 2007, 2011 and 2015,
Chart 5
5
The reality in this year’s governor’s race is that Lt. Governor Tate Reeves has history and
This history does not mean that Reeves cannot lose or that Attorney General Jim Hood
cannot win. Both are demonstrated vote-getters, and Hood has won all four of his statewide
elections by large margins and with large vote totals, as has Reeves.
But the fact is that election results for gubernatorial races in our state’s recent history
have demonstrated over and over again that the Democratic nominee has a chance to win if voter
turnout is under 800,000, while he or she almost surely cannot win if voter turnout is over
800,000.
The only thing noteworthy about the calculus for Democrats in this year’s general
election is that it marks the first time since 2003 that they have fielded a competitive nominee.
But that fact, while interesting, does not change the numbers, and Jim Hood will lose if Reeves