Back in January when Democrat Brandon Presley announced that he would be running for governor of Mississippi, the conventional wisdom was that even if he ran a good race, he’d still end up losing by 5 percentage points in this heavily Republican state.
That’s exactly what happened, as incumbent Republican Tate Reeves garnered 52% of the vote to Presley’s 47% in Tuesday’s general election.
Credit Reeves for fending off the stiffest challenge that any of the eight GOP statewide officeholders faced this year. Even as some in the national and Mississippi press were forecasting a closer election than what turned out, Reeves stuck with a game plan that has worked for him since winning a state treasurer’s race 20 years ago. He raised lots of money from the business community, dominated Northeast Mississippi and the populous Gulf Coast and, as he has in the last two elections, received the endorsement of Donald Trump, the former president who remains highly popular in this state despite his cascading legal problems.
A candidate doesn’t go 6-0 in statewide contests, as Reeves has done, without knowing a thing or two about how to win in Mississippi.
In addition, the first four years of Reeves’ tenure as governor have seen their share of accomplishments: a record-low unemployment rate; a marked improvement on school test scores in the early grades; record surpluses in the state treasury; substantial increases in teacher pay; and substantial decreases in the individual income tax. Plus, he handled the COVID-19 crisis about as well as any governor could have.
Of course, Reeves cannot fairly claim credit for all of the above, as some of this good fortune was the result of legislative action, and some of it was the result of the trillions of dollars that the federal government funneled to the states to help them deal with the pandemic. Nevertheless, the nature of politics is that those in office get the credit when things are going well and the blame when they’re not. Reeves had the advantage of running for reelection at a time when Mississippians are generally satisfied with their own economic condition and the direction in which the state is going.
The governor’s main liability was his years-long failure to respond to the growing financial crisis for Mississippi’s rural hospitals — a condition that has been exacerbated by his stubborn refusal to expand Medicaid to cover the working poor and reduce the burden of uncompensated care these hospitals shoulder. Reeves, however, minimized that liability — and reduced the effectiveness of one of Presley’s main lines of attack — by rolling out in September his own plan to increase Medicaid payments to hospitals that would not require expanding the number of people covered by the government-funded health insurance plan. It will be months before anyone knows whether this plan is implemented or whether it will produce as much additional money as Reeves claims it will, but those are not the kind of details most voters worried about. What they heard is that the governor has his own plan to shore up struggling hospitals, and it was receiving the backing of a number of hospital leaders.
That was smart politics on Reeves’ part. It reduced the odds that Presley would be able to pull off the upset, pushing the race back to where clear-eyed observers always thought it would end up: a spirited campaign, but one that Reeves was going to win.
