JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippians stood in line in some crowded precincts Tuesday to vote in a hard-fought governor’s race between Republican incumbent Tate Reeves and Democratic challenger Brandon Presley.
Republicans dominate in the conservative state, but Democrats were making an aggressive push for a rare statewide victory in the Deep South.
Presley voted in his hometown of Nettleton, in the northern part of the state. Reeves voted in downtown Jackson.
Heading into Election Day, Reeves told voters that Mississippi had momentum with job creation, low unemployment and improvements in education. He said liberal, out-of-state donors to Presley’s campaign were trying to change Mississippi.
“For you to believe Brandon Presley in anything that he says, you’ve got to believe that everything in Mississippi is bad,” Reeves said last week during the candidates’ only debate.
Presley, a state utility regulator and second cousin of Elvis Presley, said Reeves had hurt the state by refusing to expand Medicaid to cover people working lower-wage jobs that do not provide health insurance. Presley pledged to clean up government corruption, pointing to welfare money that was spent on pet projects for the wealthy and well connected rather than aid for some of the poorest people in one of the poorest states in the nation.
“He’s not going to open his mouth about ethics reform,” Presley said of Reeves. “He is the poster child of this broken, corrupt system.”
Republicans have held the Mississippi governorship for the past 20 years. They hold all statewide offices and a wide majority in the Legislature. The last time a Democrat won the presidential vote in Mississippi was 1976, when Georgia’s Jimmy Carter was on the ballot.
Presley’s campaign raised $11.3 million this year, compared with Reeves’ $6.3 million. But Reeves started the year with more money. By late October, Presley spent $10.8 million and still had $1.3 million, while Reeves spent $11 million and still had $1.2 million.
For the first time, Mississippi had the possibility of a runoff in the governor’s race if no candidate received at least 50% of the vote. An independent candidate, Gwendolyn Gray, announced weeks ago that she was dropping out and endorsing Presley, but she did it after ballots were set.
Mississippi voters in 2020 repealed a Jim Crow-era method of electing a governor and other statewide officials, which required a candidate to win both the popular vote and a majority of the 122 state House districts. Without both, a race was decided by House members who were not obligated to vote as their districts did. Contests were seldom decided by the House, but the method was written by white supremacists with the intent of keeping Black candidates out of office.
Activists with the voting rights organization Black Voters Matter drove to precincts in Jackson and other cities in a bus and a vans covered with images of civil rights leaders, including the late Fannie Lou Hamer. Carol Blackmon, the group’s Mississippi organizer, said the work was a nonpartisan effort to encourage people to vote.
“People don’t always connect voting to their everyday lives, and they need to think about that impact — think about how who is elected impacts everything that happens with your life and those of your children and your grandkids,” Blackmon said as James Brown’s “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” played from loudspeakers on the bus.
Reeves, 49, served two terms as state treasurer and two as lieutenant governor before winning an open race for governor in 2019.
Presley, 46, was mayor of his small hometown of Nettleton for six years before being elected in 2007 to the three-person Mississippi Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities.
Jimmy Ware of Natchez, a retired electrician who was backing Presley, said the local Democratic Party and the NAACP plan a big push for Black turnout on Election Day.
Heather McGee of Columbus, who owns a construction company, said she was voting for Reeves, as she did in 2019.
“After COVID and seeing how other states handled that and Tate handled it and just to see that we grew through it whereas other people took steps backwards,” McGee said. “There’s no way I would vote for anyone else after what he’s done.”
Reeves issued a stay-at-home order early in the pandemic, but he was reluctant to put long-term restrictions on schools and businesses, even as some hospitals were overwhelmed.
Mississippi voters also were electing other statewide officials.
Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann faced a Democratic challenger who had spent little money, business consultant D. Ryan Grover. In a contentious Republican primary in August, Hosemann defeated state Sen. Chris McDaniel.
Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch, whose office led the legal fight to overturn Roe v. Wade and change abortion access, sought a second term. She was challenged by Democrat Greta Kemp Martin, an attorney for Disability Rights Mississippi.
