“Mississippi needs a barnstorming governor who can drink RC colas and eat Moon Pies,” Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the only Democrat in Mississippi’s congressional delegation, said. Brandon Presley––the presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2023 Mississippi Gubernatorial election––fits the bill. With his folksy charm, Elvis connection, and north-Mississippi accent, Presley has a natural charisma that puts voters and reporters at ease.
Presley, a Mississippi Public Service Commissioner and former small-town mayor, sets up a test case for Democrats across the South. For years, Southern liberals have argued that one-party Republican rule has led to inefficient and corrupt governance that gives Democrats an opening to run as the party of clean government and economic development.
If there ever was a time and place for this theory, it would be 2023 in Mississippi. The Democratic candidate, Presley, channels a rare combination of populism and cultural competence. He stands to benefit from a unique confluence of political and economic issues, including a massive welfare corruption scandal, Republican leadership’s refusal to expand Medicaid, and Mississippi’s continued underperformance in indicators of social and economic well-being. The confidence among Democrats is palpable.
“Brandon Presley not only has a chance — I think he’ll win,” said former Senator Doug Jones (D-Alabama) of the Democratic nominee’s prospects.
Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS 2nd), the dean of Mississippi Democratic politics, echoed his sentiment. “I think this will be one of those campaigns for the books,” Thompson said.
Presley’s pitch is simple: Mississippi has been mismanaged, and the state deserves better.
Polling data is also promising. In polls of the race, Reeves, the incumbent, stands in the low-to-mid 40s, and the governor has an approval rating below fifty percent––not a position of strength for an incumbent.
Even when the political climate appears to be stacked in their favor, Democrats run against strong headwinds in Mississippi. Factors that would seem to prime the state for an opposition victory are all present. But the further one dives into the race, the murkier things become. Those skeptical of Presley’s chances concede that he is likely the last, best hope of Mississippi’s once-dominant Democratic Party, and those bullish on Presley acknowledge he is still the underdog.
Ray Mikell, a political science professor at Jackson State University, sums Presley’s greatest challenge succinctly: “some people would vote for Satan with an R by his name.”
The last time Mississippi voted for a Democrat for governor was 1999. Only one Democrat, former Attorney General Jim Hood, has won statewide office since 2003. No Democratic presidential nominee has won more than 44% of the vote in Mississippi since 1980.
Mississippi Democrats have been burned before. Democrats’ much-vaunted recruit in the 2019 gubernatorial election, former 4-term Attorney General Hood, was also a popular politician from a small, North Mississippi town. Like Presley, Hood polled well at the beginning of his race for governor. In the end, though, he lost to then-Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves by over five points––closer than any Mississippi gubernatorial election in nearly twenty years, but still not all that close to victory.
While there are many similarities between Hood and Presley’s campaigns, Hood had much higher statewide name recognition.
“Jim Hood actually had well established statewide name ID,” said Frank Corder, editor of the Magnolia Tribune. “He’d run five campaigns statewide, whereas Presley has never run a statewide campaign. So Presley’s name ID is basically nil outside of his northern district area.”
While Presley’s low name ID is a risk, Democrats hope his charisma and life story could make it harder to lump him in with the national party. Presley is widely accepted to be more charismatic than Hood.
“Presley is probably a better on-the-stump candidate and retail-politician than Hood was,” Corder said while comparing the two politicians’ campaigning abilities. “Hood was a little more stoic,” he continued.
Presley’s opponent, Governor Tate Reeves, has a playbook for defeating a promising Mississippi Democrat: attack on spending and taxes and lump the Democrat in with unpopular national figures. He’s already done it successfully once in 2019.
If Governor Tate Reeves’ 2023 State of the State Speech was any preview of his message on the campaign trail this fall, he intends to lean heavily on cultural issues this time around. “We have a duty to keep pushing back against those that are taking advantage of children and using them to advance their sick and twisted ideologies,” he said in the address. “We must take every step to preserve the innocence of our children, especially against the cruel forces of modern progressivism which seek to use them as guinea pigs in their sick social experiments.”
Many observers believe Reeves has hit on a winning strategy: tie Presley and local Democrats to the national Democratic party, which is highly unpopular in Mississippi. Corder’s newspaper, the Magnolia Tribune, polled Mississippi voters on their top issues. Among GOP voters, “protecting family values” came in first, with 26% saying it was their primary concern. Social issues are important to Mississippi voters, Corder argues, and Democrats underestimate their salience at their own peril.
Mississippians are more conservative than the country as a whole and do not align with the national Democratic Party on social and cultural issues. In 2021, the latest date in which public polling has been conducted on the issue in Mississippi, only 44% of respondents supported gay marriage. That same year, a Gallup poll found that nationwide support for gay marriage topped 70 percent. According to an analysis carried out by the New York Times, only 39% of Mississippi voters are pro-choice, the third lowest level of support for abortion rights in the country.
“Once the summer gets here, once the fall ads start and the GOP and Reeves tie Presley to his national counterparts… there won’t be much Republican crossover voting for Presley,” Corder predicted.
There is also a racial element to Reeves’ focus on cultural issues. With a history as fraught as Mississippi’s, race continues to play a critical role in the state’s politics. Mississippi politicians spent much of the 20th century explicitly fighting against progress towards equality. There are still significant gaps in educational and economic outcomes between racial groups in Mississippi, which are legacies of slavery and segregation. Yet last year Reeves claimed “there is not systemic racism in America,” and every year of his tenure has signed proclamations commemorating Confederate Heritage Month.
Despite Reeves’ strategy, Democrats do not believe social issues will stop Republicans from crossing over and lending Presley their support. Representative Thompson argued that campaigning on social issues might actually backfire on Republicans.
“I think this whole notion of woke-ism is a red-herring. Most of the people in this state are God-fearing, but you can’t scare them to death with terms you can’t define,” Thompson said. “What I’m hearing from people is they resent somebody telling me what kind of book I can read, or what kind of play I can go to.”
Thompson also argues that voters find much of the discourse around social issues a distraction.
“When we try to replace democratic principles with terms of convenience, like wokeism, I think you will find by and large people resent that. People are smarter than that,” Thompson said. Democrats’ response is to shift the focus towards economic issues, corruption, and health care where they feel they have an advantage.
This approach was clearly articulated in Brandon Presley’s Democratic response to Governor Reeves’ State of the State Speech, where he honed in on corruption and health care. His flair for the dramatic was on full display: he delivered the speech from a shuttered rural hospital, with disused medical equipment lingering at the edges of the frame. Using his location as a prop to bash his opponent’s policies, Presley hit the governor’s administration on rural hospital closures and refusal to expand Medicaid. These issues poll well in Mississippi, where a vast majority of people, including a majority of Republicans, support Medicaid expansion.
***
While issues and broader political trends often determine the outcome of a race, individual candidates matter. Over the last decade, ticket splitting has cratered across the country, but has proven most durable in state elections. In recent years, an assortment of Democratic gubernatorial candidates have won elections in states with difficult political climates, including John Bel Edwards in neighboring Louisiana and Andy Beshear in Kentucky.
Brandon Presley may have what it takes to pull off a similar success. He serves as the Public Service Commissioner for the northern third of Mississippi, and is a former mayor of Nettleton, MS, his hometown. He is, by all accounts, a gifted politician—with a striking biography.
Presley is a second cousin of Mississippi’s most famous son, Elvis. Like his famous relative, Presley grew up poor. His father, an alcoholic, was murdered while he was in third grade. After his father’s death, his Uncle Harold helped his mother raise him. Presley’s exposure to politics started early; when he was 16, he ran his Uncle Harold’s successful campaign for county sheriff. “We could see through the floor, straight to the dirt,” Presley said of his childhood home in his campaign launch video.
After graduating from Mississippi State University, Presley returned to Nettleton and embarked on his political career, becoming one of the youngest elected mayors in Mississippi’s history the next year at age 23. His mother died just before he won his office and his Uncle Harold, the county sheriff, was killed on the job a few weeks after his inauguration.
As mayor, Presley aggressively pursued grant money, cut local taxes, and streamlined government services. Under Presley, the city returned to growth after losing nearly one-fifth of its residents over the decade preceding his tenure. After two terms as mayor, Presley ran for the Mississippi Public Service Commission, the state’s energy and utility regulatory board, winning handily four times in a heavily conservative district.
Presley is a skilled retail politician. His modest background sticks out––Presley’s opponent, Tate Reeves, received a $115,000 donation from his businessman father when he first ran for public office. Presley has a knack for speaking to people about the issues affecting their everyday lives. When he won a rebate for Mississippi residents who had been overcharged by an energy company, he made a whistle-stop tour of northern Mississippi, posing with an oversized, $80 check made out to “Mississippi Customers.” He has been known to perform old Elvis ballads; his favorites are “Suspicious Minds” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”
Over the last fifteen years, Presley has used his position on the Public Service Commission to wage a populist crusade on behalf of consumers. He has gone after what he perceived to be wasteful spending on untested “clean-coal” technology, made it easier for small local firms to compete for state contracts, and fought for rural broadband, comparing the fight for expanded internet service to FDR’s effort to electrify the South in the 1930s and 40s.
“This is the electricity of the 21st century, make no mistake about it. Not having a connection to high-speed internet service is holding many of our people back,” Presley said in a 2020 speech. Similar sentiments feature in his stump speech today. If Democrats had their way, the election would be fought on economic development, health care, and corruption. Infrastructure pitches, like Brandon Presley’s message on broadband, would be center-stage, and social issues would be avoided altogether.
At the core of Democrats’ perceived advantage on issues like economic development, infrastructure, and health care is the fact that Mississippi ranks dead last nationally in many indicators of social and economic well-being. While some statistics have improved over the last ten years, notably in K-12 education, the state is still at or near the bottom in many categories. Mississippi has the lowest life expectancy at birth in the United States, the lowest GDP per capita, and the third-lowest adult literacy rates.
Democrats like Representative Thompson see these unfortunate facts as an opportunity for Democrats, not just in Mississippi but across the South.
“Our Republican leadership works hard at keeping us 50th in the nation, and that’s just so unfortunate,” Thompson said. “We can’t even fully fund public schools in this state.”
Democrats hope to use these numbers to craft a larger narrative of Republican leadership failing Mississippi. They want Mississippians to connect Republican leadership, allegations of corruption, and the fact that the state lags the nation in many measures of socio-economic well-being.
While the political implications of corruption are unclear, the scale and details of the scandal in question, known as the TANF scandal, are astonishing.
Under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) welfare program, states receive money in lump sums for poverty alleviation, but they have broad discretion over how to use the funds.
In 2020, reporting by Mississippi Today and the Mississippi Free Press revealed massive corruption in the administration of Mississippi’s TANF program. According to State Auditor Shad White, between 2016 and 2020, nearly 80 million dollars of TANF funding was misused. One especially controversial example involved funds sent to Brett Favre, Mississippi native and former Green Bay Packers quarterback. The state used 1.1 million dollars of TANF funds to pay Brett Favre for public appearances. Favre has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing, and maintains that he did not know the money was allocated for poverty reduction.
Further investigation revealed that hundreds of thousands of dollars in TANF funds also went to former pro-wrestler Brett DiBiase, who was paid to run classes on substance abuse prevention that he never actually taught. DiBiase has plead guilty to one count of “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States.”
The DiBiase and Favre cases account for just a small fraction of the nearly 80 million dollars siphoned away from Mississippi’s poorest residents. Entities of all kinds received welfare funds, though many groups and individuals who received these funds were unaware of their origins. Others known to have received money earmarked for welfare run the gamut from out-of-state drug companies looking to invest in Mississippi to charter-school operators and athletic programs at Mississippi universities.
Democrats think highlighting the TANF scandal is a winning strategy.
“It’s just stunning what is happening over in Mississippi,” said Senator Jones. “I think people are beginning to see now that there are other opportunities, and their state government makes a difference.”
Representative Bennie Thompson also believes the TANF scandal will provide a big boost to Democrats. “Wealthy football players and others have taken TANF dollars as their own personal piggy bank, and built volleyball courts,” he said.
“Now people are saying, wait, all of these people are Republicans who are taking this money. The beneficiaries might have been low- and moderate-income residents, both Black and white. But the money never got to the individuals it was intended to,” he continued.
But those outside the Democratic ecosystem are less certain that the TANF scandal will be a major factor in this fall’s election. Professor Mikell argues that the misuse of TANF funds is an issue with the potential to help Democrats, but he is still dubious.
“The TANF stuff is a scandal and a half, but I’m not sure how much awareness the everyday Mississippian has of it,” Mikell said. “You could do quite the negative ad, but does he have enough money to get the word out?”
Even if Democrats were to marshal the resources necessary to spread their message on corruption, Corder of the Magnolia Tribune is not convinced voters will care. He noted a recent poll where only 9% of GOP voters and 8% of Democrats cited public corruption as their top issue in the gubernatorial election.
“Voters really aren’t seeing that as a top issue in this election cycle,” Corder explained.
Another issue Democrats hope will break in their favor is the governor’s refusal to expand Medicaid. Polling in Mississippi has shown consistent support among both major parties for Medicaid expansion, which would increase the number of low-income residents eligible for free health coverage. Although some Republican leaders in the state have expressed openness to it in the past, Governor Reeves is strongly opposed.
Democrats believe issues like health care and corruption will allow them to define this race outside of the racial prism that has long shaped partisan politics in Mississippi.
“While race has always been the litmus test for a lot of elections in our state, what we have now are some issues that transcend race,” Rep. Thompson explained. “Our governor refuses to take the Medicaid expansion dollars that are available. And so we’re having hospitals closing, and we’re having health centers closing, and you find those closings in communities that are both predominantly black and predominantly white. So it’s no longer perceived as a one race issue. It’s a Mississippi issue.”
Again, observers outside the Democratic Party are less sure. Professor Mikell agrees that Medicaid expansion is popular in the state and beneficial for Democrats, but notes that it was also a big issue in the 2019 governor’s race, and did not swing the race against Reeves then. On the Medicaid expansion front, Mikell points out, nothing fundamental has changed over the last four years.
Frank Corder argues that Medicaid expansion is popular among Republicans in theory, but cites polling data that shows its strength as an issue plummets when framed around costs and economic interests.
“It depends on how you phrase the question,” Corder explains. “If you actually ask the question from a monetary standpoint,” he continues, “that support of it goes significantly down.”
Mississippi Democrats believe the race is about more than just economic issues, health care, or corruption. It’s about a broader frustration with the state lagging behind the rest of the country. Democrats believe they can tap into a feeling that their state is underachieving. Former Senator Doug Jones, from neighboring Alabama, articulated this general feeling most forcefully.
“People are going to rise up and say, ‘enough is enough. We’re tired of folks in Alabama saying thank God for Mississippi. We want to move this state forward. And we want a government that’s responsive to people… We want the funds to go where they [belong] in a state that is the poorest state in the country. We’re ready for change,’” Jones said.
It is unclear whether Brandon Presley can pull off a victory in Mississippi this fall. But to dismiss his campaign—even if he were to lose—would be a mistake. That he is running a competitive race in Mississippi at all is a testament to the fact that there is some truth to Senator Jones’ criticisms of the status quo.
The 2023 Mississippi gubernatorial election could mark the beginning of a new era of reform spearheaded by Democrats across the South, one to rival that led by the “New South” governors of the 1960s and 70s. Or the outcome in November could prove Republicans correct in contending that Mississippi is already in an era of reform under GOP leadership, in which educational outcomes are improving and wages are increasing. It is too soon to tell. But what is certain is that this fall’s election is one battle in a broader war being fought across the South between competing visions for the region. For those invested in the future of the American South, the governor’s race in Mississippi is the one to watch.