Mississippi Today
Final election results: 2023 was the closest Mississippi governor’s race since 1999
Incumbent Gov. Tate Reeves garnered 50.9% of the vote in winning reelection on Nov. 7 — the closest Mississippi governor’s race since 1999.
Reeves garnered 418,233 votes (50.9%), Democrat Brandon Presley received 391,614 (47.7%) and independent Gwendolyn Gray received 11,153 votes (1.4%), according to final county-by-county voting totals posted this week by the secretary of state’s office.
Reeves beat Presley by 26,619 votes — a considerably tighter margin than the governor’s race four years ago, when Reeves defeated Democrat Jim Hood by 45,028 votes to win a first term in the Governor’s Mansion.
The secretary of state‘s office did not receive the final results from all 82 counties until this week. Counties have a certain time period after the election to count late-arriving mail-in ballots and affidavit ballots.
A Democrat has not won the governor’s mansion in Mississippi since 1999, when Ronnie Musgrove prevailed with a plurality of the vote. Musgrove received 49.6% that year compared to 48.5% from Republican Mike Parker.
In 2019, Reeves won his first term as governor by defeating then-Attorney General Jim Hood 51.9% to 46.8%. While the percentage difference was closer in the 2023 election, Hood won more total votes in 2019 than Presley did this year. Hood received 414,368 votes in 2019, while Presley received 391,614 votes in 2023. In 2019, 63,911 more people voted than this year.
Presley narrowly captured three counties in 2023 that Hood did not win in 2019. Those counties were Lowndes, Grenada and Forrest. The 2023 election marked the first time since 1979 for a Democrat to win Forrest County. But Presley also lost two counties in 2023 that Hood won in 2019. Four years ago, Hood won the counties of Madison and Lafayette. Both those counties flipped to Reeves in 2023.
Those counties, along with Hood’s home county of Chickasaw and Oktibbeha, are the only majority white counties to vote for the Democrat in either election.
RESULTS: Mississippi statewide election 2023
Reeves will be the first Mississippi governor elected to a second term with a smaller percentage of the total vote than he received in winning his first term. It is important to note, though, that Reeves is only the fourth governor elected to consecutive terms. Mississippi governors have only been allowed to serve two terms since the late 1980s.
Also, Reeves received a much smaller percentage of the vote than the winners of the other seven statewide offices — all Republican.
For instance, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, in winning reelection, won 490,956 votes or 60.7% of the total. The Democratic candidates for the other seven statewide posts ran lower profile and lower budget campaigns than their Republican opponents.
Presley, a four-term public service commissioner for the northern district, ran an aggressive campaign, outraising Reeves in 2023. The incumbent, though, came into the election year with a massive campaign war chest that dwarfed that of Presley.
In the first year in which a gubernatorial race could possibly have gone to a runoff, Reeves avoided that historic scenario by just 15,466 votes. Under a new state law, if no candidate for statewide office garners a majority vote, the top two vote-getters advance to a runoff.
Reeves ultimately prevailed by running up large margins on the Gulf Coast, in Presley’s home area of northeast Mississippi, and in certain areas of east Mississippi.
Presley garnered 54,006 votes in Democrat-rich Hinds County compared to 13,634 for Reeves. But despite Presley’s much ballyhooed get-out-the-vote effort in Hinds, Hood still garnered 2,125 more votes in Hinds in 2019 than did Presley in 2023.
Overall, the vote total in Hinds was down 4,182 in 2023 compared to 2019. It is difficult to say whether Hinds County election problems in 2023 caused fewer people to cast ballots. But Hinds had problems with long lines and with some precincts running out of ballots for extended periods of time.
Final results from other statewide races
Lieutenant governor:
Republican incumbent Delbert Hosemann: 490,956
Democrat Ryan Grover: 317,347
Attorney general
Republican incumbent Lynn Fitch: 470,270
Democrat Greta Kemp Martin: 339,948
Secretary of state
Republican incumbent Michael Watson: 481,895
Democrat Ty Pinkins: 328,067
Treasurer
Republican incumbent David McRae: 472,705
Democrat Addy Lee Green: 337,008
Auditor
Republican incumbent Shad White: 474,313
Democrat Larry Bradford: 334,418
Insurance commissioner
Republican incumbent Mike Chaney: 480,514
Democrat Bruce Burton: 329,214
Agriculture commissioner
Republican incumbent Andy Gipson: 467,901
Democrat Robert Bradford: 342,172
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1875
Nov. 2, 1875
The first Mississippi Plan, which included violence against Black Americans to keep them from voting, resulted in huge victories for white Democrats across the state.
A year earlier, the Republican Party had carried a majority of the votes, and many Black Mississippians had been elected to office. In the wake of those victories, white leagues arose to challenge Republican rule and began to use widespread violence and fraud to recapture control of the state.
Over several days in September 1875, about 50 Black Mississippians were killed along with white supporters, including a school teacher who worked with the Black community in Clinton.
The governor asked President Ulysses Grant to intervene, but he decided against intervening, and the violence and fraud continued. Other Southern states soon copied the Mississippi plan.
John R. Lynch, the last Black congressman for Mississippi until the 1986 election of Mike Espy, wrote: “It was a well-known fact that in 1875 nearly every Democratic club in the State was converted into an armed military company.”
A federal grand jury concluded: “Fraud, intimidation, and violence perpetrated at the last election is without a parallel in the annals of history.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
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In a time when trusted journalists and media sources are disappearing, we believe the stakes couldn’t be higher. Without on-the-ground, trustworthy reporting, civic engagement suffers, accountability falters and corruption often goes unaddressed. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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We’ll examine what’s at stake if local newsrooms lose press freedoms and will discuss how you, as members of the public, can help protect it. This event is open to Mississippi Today and Verite News members as a special thank-you for supporting local journalism and standing with us in this mission. Donate today to RSVP!
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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Hinds County loses fight over control of jail
The Hinds County sheriff and Board of Supervisors have lost an appeal to prevent control of its jail by a court-appointed receiver and an injunction that orders the county to address unconstitutional conditions in the facility.
Two members from a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with decisions by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves to appoint a receiver to oversee day-to-day jail operations and keep parts of a previous consent decree in place to fix constitutional violations, including a failure to protect detainees from harm.
However, the appeals court called the new injunction “overly broad” in one area and is asking Reeves to reevaluate the scope of the receivership.
The injunction retained provisions relating to sexual assault, but the appeals court found the provisions were tied to general risk of violence at the jail, rather than specific concerns about the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The court reversed those points of the injunction and remanded them to the district court so the provisions can be removed.
The court also found that the receiver should not have authority over budgeting and staff salaries for the Raymond Detention Center, which could be seen as “federal intrusion into RDC’s budget” – especially if the receivership has no end date.
Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Robert Graham was not immediately available for comment Friday. Sheriff Tyree Jones declined to comment because he has not yet read the entire court opinion.
In 2016, the Department of Justice sued Hinds County alleging a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conditions in four of its detention facilities. The county and DOJ entered a consent decree with stipulated changes to make for the jail system, which holds people facing trial.
“But the decree did not resolve the dispute; to the contrary, a yearslong battle ensued in the district court as to whether and to what extent the County was complying with the consent decree,” the appeals court wrote.
This prompted Reeves to hold the county in contempt of court twice in 2022.
The county argued it was doing its best to comply with the consent decree and spending millions to fix the jail. One of the solutions they offered was building a new jail, which is now under construction in Jackson.
The county had a chance to further prove itself during three weeks of hearings held in February 2022. Focuses included the death of seven detainees in 2021 from assaults and suicide and issues with staffing, contraband, old infrastructure and use of force.
Seeing partial compliance by the county, in April 2022 Reeves dismissed the consent decree and issued a new, shorter injunction focused on the jail and removed some provisions from the decree.
But Reeves didn’t see improvement from there. In July 2022, he ordered receivership and wrote that it was needed because of an ongoing risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff.
The county pushed back against federal oversight and filed an appeal, arguing that there isn’t sufficient evidence to show that there are current and ongoing constitutional violations at the jail and that the county has acted with deliberate indifference.
Days before the appointed receiver was set to take control of the jail at the beginning of 2023, the 5th Circuit Court ordered a stay to halt that receiver’s work. The new injunction ordered by Reeves was also stayed, and a three-person jail monitoring team that had been in place for years also was ordered to stop work.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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