Mississippi Today
In U.S. presidential elections, not all votes are equal
A Mississippian’s vote for president carries more weight than the vote of a Californian or than the vote of a resident of most other states.
Mississippi, with just under 3 million people, has six electoral votes for president โ or one for every 496,880 of its citizens. California, on the other hand, has 54 electoral votes for about 39.5 million people โ or one for about every 732,190 of its citizens.
But both Mississippi and California pale in comparison to sparsely populated Wyoming in terms of the weight of its electoral votes. Wyoming, with 576,851 people, has three electoral votes, or one vote for 192,284 Wyoming residents.
The national average, based on the latest U.S. Census numbers, is 632,518 people for each of the nation’s 538 electoral votes.
Votes for president in America are not equal.
The weight of electoral votes is of relevance as the nation goes through the cycle of electing the next president. The presidential election is viewed as a national race, but in a real sense it is about 10 separate campaigns in what has become known as swing states or purple states.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, will spend significant time and attention campaigning in Georgia, Pennsylvania and a handful of other swing states, while paying little or no attention to Mississippi, California or most other states.
America’s founding fathers opted not to elect the president by popular votes but by what is known as the Electoral College.
In that process, each state has the number of electoral votes equal to its number of U.S. House members plus its two senators. For instance, Mississippi has four U.S. House members and the two senators. California has 52 U.S. House members plus its two senators.
The fact that each state has two senators is one of the primary reasons the electoral votes of less populous states carry more weight than the votes of more populous states like California and Texas.
In all but two states, all of the electoral votes go to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes in that state regardless of the margin of victory. Maine and Nebraska split their electoral votes. The two Senate electors go to the candidate who wins the most votes statewide in those two states. But a candidate gets one electoral vote for each congressional district won in Maine and Nebraska.
Nebraska, like Mississippi, is a solid Republican state. But because Nebraska does not have a winner-take-all Electoral College process, it is likely that Harris and Trump will spend more time in Nebraska’s 2nd District, considered a swing district, than in those much larger non-swing states.
The Electoral College was a compromise between the founding fathers who wanted the president to be elected via popular vote and those who wanted Congress to elect the president. And, like so many aspects of American history, the compromise had racial elements. The notorious Three-Fifths Compromise counted Black residents who could not vote as three-fifths of a person to benefit the Southern states, where a significant portion of the population was slaves. The Three-Fifths Compromise gave Southern states more representation in Congress and thus more representation in the Electoral College.
And to this day, it could be argued the Electoral College still discriminates against Black residents since many Southern states, including Mississippi, have higher percentages of Black citizens who are generally more prone to vote Democratic. Because of the Electoral College, those Black voters in the South have little influence since by wide margins Southern whites, who make up the majority, are more likely to vote Republican and swing the Southern’s states electoral votes to the Republican.
The Electoral College process is in the U.S. Constitution. To amend the Constitution and change the electoral process would be time consuming and burdensome.
But there is another process called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Under the compact, the Electoral College process could be circumvented if legislatures in states with a majority of the of the electoral votes (270) pledged to give their electors to the candidate who won the popular vote.
The proposal has been filed in the Mississippi Legislature but has never been given serious consideration. Thus far 17 states with 207 electoral votes have agreed to the compact. It is not likely to pass anytime soon, though, because Republican-dominated states generally oppose the plan โ at least in part because the Republican presidential candidate has lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections.
In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million, but Trump would have won reelection if about 21,000 voters in a handful of swing states had voted for him instead of Biden.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) โ A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 โ a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as โthe King of Ragtime,โ copyrighted the โMaple Leaf Rag,โ which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s โfirst classical music.โย
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: โMy faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, โMy gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’โ
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, โThe Sting,โ which won an Oscar for the music. His song, โThe Entertainer,โ reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among โSongs of the Centuryโ list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera โTreemonishaโ was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.ย
โThe ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,โ Rifkin said. โHe is a treasurable composer.โ
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
-
Mississippi News Video5 days ago
Woman arrested after reposting school threat in Calhoun County
-
News from the South - Louisiana News Feed5 days ago
Food drive underway for Hurricane Francine victims in Kenner
-
Mississippi Today3 days ago
On this day in 1925
-
News from the South - Kentucky News Feed4 days ago
The search for Joseph Couch intensifies
-
News from the South - Alabama News Feed2 days ago
Diddy Arrested In Manhattan | September 16, 2024 | News 19 at 10 p.m.
-
News from the South - Alabama News Feed5 days ago
Sylacauga Church welcomes Haitian migrants amid speculations
-
Mississippi Today3 days ago
Another Midwest drought is causing transportation headaches on the Mississippi River
-
News from the South - Florida News Feed6 days ago
Tropics update: Tropical Depression 7, 2 other disturbances brewing in Atlantic