(The Center Square) — The biggest question in the upcoming Mississippi governor’s race is whether Democrat Brandon Presley can pull off an upset in November over incumbent Republican Tate Reeves.

Presley, who serves as the Northern District Public Service Commissioner, faces two big obstacles to becoming the first Democratic governor to win the office since 1999.

One of those is name recognition. According to a Mason-Dixon poll of 625 likely voters with a margin of error of 4% commissioned by the Magnolia Tribune in March, 95% of respondents were familiar with Reeves, while only 63% knew Presley.

A Siena College Research Institute poll commissioned by Mississippi Today of 783 registered voters with a margin of error of 4.3% a month later didn’t show any major improvement, as 64% of respondents said they didn’t know that much about him.

The other problem beside name recognition for Presley is a lack of money as the challenger. One area where Reeves excels is fundraising, as he amassed a campaign fund of $9 million according to his latest filing.

While Presley has done well, taking in $1.4 million since the start of the year, he only has $1.6 million in his campaign account, a huge disparity to overcome.

Glenn Antizzo, a professor of political science at Mississippi College, says that lack of name recognition could be costly for Presley in a number of ways.

“I know he doesn’t have a whole lot of money,” Antizzo said. “But he has to be careful not to let the GOP basically create the narrative around him because they have a much bigger war chest, and define who he is before he even gets a chance to say, you know, ‘Hi, my name is Brandon Presley.’”

Despite the lack of name recognition, Reeves’ unfavorability ratings in both polls might trend to a closer race. In the Mason-Dixon poll, 56% of respondents had an unfavorable or neutral view of the governor while it was 57% that had an unfavorable or didn’t know enough to say rating.

Antizzo says the nation’s trend toward tribal, overly-partisan politics is definitely part of the equation in the Magnolia State. He says that might help Reeves overcome his sizable unfavorability ratings in polls with GOP voters who dislike him.

“That pretty much everybody wants to win, wants their team to win and wants the other team to lose,” Antizzo said. “And I think at the end of the day, a lot of the people who probably don’t like Reeves but are more on the conservative side are gonna hold their nose and vote for him anyway.”

There are factors from Reeves’ 2019 victory that won’t be in play come November.

Reeves had to fend off a bruising primary challenge from former state Supreme Court Justice Bill Waller Jr. that he defeated by a 54.1% to 45.9% vote in the GOP primary.

This time, he has no well-funded, serious challenger. Another factor in 2019 being such a close race was the entrance into the field of the Democrats’ last remaining statewide officeholder.

Former Democratic state Attorney General Jim Hood had much better name recognition (only 2% of respondents in a 2019 Mason-Dixon poll didn’t know who he was) than Presley. He was unable to pull off perhaps the Democrats’ best chance of turning the governor’s mansion blue.

Reeves won with 51.9% of the vote in that race.

Where Hood faltered was his home area of northeast Mississippi, a once-traditional Democrat stronghold that is also home to Presley. In the nine counties in the northeast corner of the state, Hood only managed more than 40% of the vote in one of them, Lee County (Tupelo). The rest went for Reeves by huge margins.

Another area where Reeves dominated was in the six coastal counties. Hood only managed to eclipse 40% of the vote in Harrison County, with Reeves rolling up huge victories elsewhere.

Antizzo says that the Republicans will likely try to tie the populist Presley, who refers to himself as a proud “New Deal Democrat” to the national Democratic Party. Former President Donald Trump carried Mississippi with 57.6% of the vote in the 2020 election.

“He’s (Presley) a traditional Mississippi Democrat, just slightly left of center,” Antizzo said. “But as you could tell from the governor’s announcement speech, he was already starting down that road of framing Presley as you know, some AOC clone.”

AOC is the acronym given to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY.