BACK TO THE FUTURE

©Andy Taggart, 2019

Taggart, Rimes & Graham, PLLC
andy@trglawyers.com
@andy_taggart

A couple of weeks ago, in a piece entitled “Votes Matter,” we looked at the history of

Mississippi’s last forty years of governor’s elections, and tried to draw some conclusions about

what might happen in the race between Tate Reeves and Jim Hood. I suggested in that column

that if voter turnout on Election Day exceeded 800,000 votes, Tate Reeves would be elected

Governor of the State of Mississippi. Unofficial totals from yesterday’s results show that more

than 860,000 votes were cast in the governor’s race, and of those, over 850,000 were cast for

Reeves or Hood.

Tate Reeves won handily.

The key historical premise of that earlier piece was that Democrats running for governor

have never been able to gather more than a few votes over 400,000, no matter the circumstances.

Prior to yesterday, only William Winter (1979), Bill Allain (1983) and Ronnie Musgrove (2003)

had cracked the 400,000-vote mark, and only by the barest margin in each of those elections.

Jim Hood barely topped 400,000 votes yesterday. With all precincts reporting, his

unofficial total stands at 401,175 as of this writing.

Adding yesterday’s results to the charts published two weeks ago only serves to make my

earlier point even more strongly: no matter what they do, who they run, or how well they finance

their campaigns, Democrats running for governor in Mississippi cannot break the 400,000-vote

barrier by any significant number of votes.

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 A first look at Chart 1 might lead to the quick, and inaccurate, conclusion that Democrats

have turned it around in Mississippi. Because the lines representing vote totals of the candidates

appear to be converging after yesterday’s election, some optimistic Democrats might be tempted

to read the data to mean that “we’ll get them next time.”

Chart 1

But when seen for what they are, yesterday’s numbers only return us to the historic range

in which vote totals were running in gubernatorial races before the highly uncompetitive election

years of 2007, 2011 and 2015.

Chart 2 shows results for Democratic nominees for governor for all elections since 1975,

and again, Jim Hood’s marked improvement in number of votes over the Democratic nominees

in recent elections seems impressive.

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Chart 2

But the elections of 2007, 2011 and 2015 were not competitive races and the results from

those years skew the trend line in a way that can lead to bad conclusions. When we take the

totals from those three races out of the mix, as reflected in Chart 3, and compare Hood’s totals to

races from 2003 and before, we see that he ended up right where we expected – hovering just

above 400,000 votes:

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Chart 3

And, the converse is true for Tate Reeves’s winning total yesterday. Unofficially, Reeves

polled an impressive 449,841 votes.

When viewed against the totals earned by Republican Phil Bryant in his two successful

races for governor (2011 and 2015), Reeves’s total yesterday might appear to be a pull back for

Republicans. Take a look at Chart 4:

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Chart 4

But if we drop out the results from those two election years, and also from 2007, though

Reeves polled higher yesterday than Haley Barbour did in his reelection bid in 2007, we see that

the Republican standard bearer’s total yesterday was almost exactly where we would have

expected it to be based on history, and comes quite close to Barbour’s total in the last

competitive race for governor (2003) before this year’s. Chart 5 shows Republican-only vote

totals for elections up to 2003, plus 2019, but the three elections of 2007, 2011 and 2015 omitted:

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Chart 5

Those who will point to yesterday’s results as a basis for building a Democratic strategy

for the future will find themselves disappointed. And the false narrative that Tate Reeves could

not unite Republicans in a race against a popular, populist Democratic opponent was just that –

false.