Mississippi Today
Several GOP consultants share predictions about runoff between Tate Reeves, Brandon Presley

Welcome to The Homestretch, a daily blog featuring the most comprehensive coverage of the 2023 Mississippi governor’s race. This page, curated by the Mississippi Today politics team, will feature the biggest storylines of the 2023 governor’s race at 7 a.m. every day between now and the Nov. 7 election.
OXFORD — The buzz of the annual “Good Ole Boys and Gals” political event on Thursday wasn’t the stump speeches from high-profile politicians ahead of the Nov. 7 statewide election. It wasn’t the big season Ole Miss football is having, and it wasn’t even the sweet-smelling BBQ chicken.
It was Gov. Tate Reeves’ poll numbers and the growing likelihood of a Nov. 28 gubernatorial runoff between Reeves and his Democratic challenger Brandon Presley.
One consultant at the event who is not affiliated with the Reeves campaign said they had seen a recent internal poll that showed the incumbent governor several points under 50%. A significant portion of voters, the source said, remained undecided or said they will cast votes for Gwendolyn Gray, an independent candidate.
“There have been several polls in the last 10 days that almost guarantee he’ll be in a runoff election,” the consultant, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak frankly, said. “I would think the Democrats are smelling blood in the water.”
Gray has publicly announced that she is no longer seeking the office and supporting Presley. Her announcement, however, came too late because state officials had already printed ballots, so her presence on the ballot created a runoff probability.
If no candidate on the general election ballot receives more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters will participate in a runoff election on Nov. 28, just five days after Thanksgiving.
Another consultant at the event said they had also reviewed recent polling numbers and doubted if Reeves could garner an outright majority on the first ballot, though they declined to share the specific numbers.
“I’ve crunched the numbers, and anyway you slice it, I’d be preparing for a runoff if I was them,” they said of the Reeves campaign.
A third consultant speculated that while the governor hasn’t hit the 50% mark in some public polls, they don’t believe it will actually translate into a runoff scenario on Election Day. They believe undecided voters will get Reeves over 50%.
With insiders digesting poll numbers, baked beans and coleslaw at the event on Thursday, it was notable that so many attendees were openly speculating about the fact an incumbent Republican governor in a reliably red state may not win on the first ballot.
Reeves, in his speech to the event’s attendees, did not directly mention the runoff possibility, but he appeared to hint at the trouble he’s had reaching 50%. In his stump speech — well, technically a “bench speech” as the candidates at the event stand on an old, wooden bench — he said the only way he could win the general election is “if conservatives show up to the polls.”
“I’m proud of the fact that we’re winning in every poll out there, even in the ones where they fake the outcome,” Reeves said. “But none of those polls matter. The only poll that matters is the one that’s taken on Election Day.”
One person who was noticeably absent was Presley, who currently represents Oxford as north Mississippi’s public service commissioner and has attended the event in previous years. John Morgan, one of the event’s organizers and an Oxford alderman, told attendees that Presley’s campaign initially indicated they would come and participate, but he did not show.
Reeves seized on Presley’s absence at the festival, located in the Democrat’s home turf of north Mississippi and roughly an hour away from his hometown of Nettleton.
“I’m going to be honest with you: I’m not at all surprised that my opponent didn’t have the guts to show up in north Mississippi tonight,” Reeves said. “He’s probably in California or New York meeting with billionaires who are funding his campaign.”
Presley, in a statement to Mississippi Today, did not address his absence but criticized Reeves’ rhetoric.
“Tate Reeves talks real tough and acts real wimpy,” Presley said. “I look forward to cleaning his clock across my home region of North Mississippi on Election Day where I’ve been elected four times.”
Partisan brinkmanship may have been on display between the two candidates for governor, but there were unifying moments on Thursday to mark the death of Johnny Morgan, a former state lawmaker who first organized “Good Ole Boys and Gals” in the mid-1980s.
Morgan, a notable entrepreneur who was a cousin to the Oxford alderman, died in a plane crash in June and was widely viewed as a political powerbroker. House Speaker Philip Gunn, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker and Reeves all paid tribute to Johnny Morgan in their speeches.
Headlines From The Trail
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Republican operatives sound every alarm on current trajectory of 2023 governor’s race
What We’re Watching
1) A lecture series continues today at Galloway United Methodist Church in downtown Jackson. Galloway, the home church of Gov. Tate Reeves, is hosting faith leaders who will advocate for Medicaid expansion, among other things. Mississippi Today’s Bobby Harrison wrote last month about the series. Here’s how Reeves’ pastor Rev. Cary Stockett framed it: “We want it understood that this is a kingdom of God issue, grossly ignored right in the middle of the Bible Belt. We want the people who quote John 3:16 to understand that it matters to Jesus that there are people (our Mississippi neighbors) without real access to good healthcare … and so it should matter to us, too.”
2) Presley has a busy weekend ahead. On Saturday, he’ll campaign in Ridgeland, Vicksburg, Yazoo City and Pike County. On Sunday, he’ll campaign in Pascagoula, Gulfport and DeSoto County. That’s a lot of ground to cover. We haven’t seen Reeves’ schedule, but it’ll almost certainly be as crowded.
3) Are candidates spending any time in debate prep? The one and only debate of the cycle will be held Wednesday, Nov. 1. It is sure to be a contentious, bitter affair. If you’re in the Jackson metro area, come to Hal & Mal’s for a Mississippi Today watch party. We’ll stream the debate live at 7 p.m. on the big screen, and we’ll host some live analysis as soon as it ends.
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 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies
April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”
He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914.
In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.”
In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.”
In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness.
Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget
On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.
Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.
Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.
Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.
The fight centers around multiple factors, including:
- Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
- Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
- Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
- Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.
It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.
But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.
It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.
An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.
According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.
The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.
As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.
But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.
In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
1964: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed
April 26, 1964

Civil rights activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white regular delegation to the Democratic National Convention.
The regulars had already adopted this resolution: “We oppose, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi, and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years.”
In reality, Black Mississippians had been victims of intimidation, harassment and violence for daring to try and vote as well as laws passed to disenfranchise them. As a result, by 1964, only 6% of Black Mississippians were permitted to vote. A year earlier, activists had run a mock election in which thousands of Black Mississippians showed they would vote if given an opportunity.
In August 1964, the Freedom Party decided to challenge the all-white delegation, saying they had been illegally elected in a segregated process and had no intention of supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in the November election.
The prediction proved true, with white Mississippi Democrats overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. While the activists fell short of replacing the regulars, their courageous stand led to changes in both parties.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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