Republicans dominate state
The Nov. 5 elections showed without doubt that Republicans have complete sway over Mississippi politics. Voters mostly voted straight down party lines with little regard to the particular candidate’s ideas or qualifications. Each candidate for statewide office got roughly the same 60 percent majority, with the one exception of governor where Democrat Jim Hood pulled some Republican votes, although nowhere near enough to make it a close race with Tate Reeves.
White voters, in general, voted straight Republican, and black voters, generally, voted straight Democrat. That’s certainly their right, although we wish electors would spend more time thinking specifically about what each candidate offers Mississippi and the position they will hold rather than on what Trump, Pelosi and company are doing in Washington.
Clearly, a strong majority of Mississippians are fed up with the national Democratic Party, and who can blame them? The national Democrats are getting nuttier by the hour in their quixotic quest for “social justice.” The problem, however, is that actual governance in Mississippi has little to do with “coastal liberal elites.” Now it’s up to Republicans to actually deliver something for Mississippi, which has seen tepid economic growth, poor educational outcomes and an outflux of talent. Let’s hope they can offer meaningful solutions, not power plays, crony deals and moral posturing.
New crop of state leaders
One of the enduring political debates in recent decades has been whether the nation would be better served if term limits were imposed on members of Congress as they are on the president.
There was an entire revolutionary political movement, the Republicans’ Contract With America in 1994, whose most memorable promise was to limit members of the House and Senate to 12 years in office. Once elected, though, most of these revolutionaries lost their enthusiasm for early retirement from political office.
Mississippi has never seriously approached putting term limits on state lawmakers, but it does impose them on two members of the executive branch: the governor and the lieutenant governor, both of whom are limited to two terms.
Not all that long ago, though, governors in this state were even more hamstrung, being allowed to serve for only one term before having to turn the job over to someone else. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that their possible length of office was extended to two terms.
Other members of the executive branch have no such restrictions. As with lawmakers, they can stay on as long as they keep getting elected.
This year, an unusually large crop of lower-ballot state officials decided to impose term limits on themselves, largely because they decided to run for a higher office.
Going into last week’s elections, it was already certain that at least five of the statewide positions would have new occupants. And two of the other three were guaranteed to have someone holding the position with less than two years of experience.
That’s a highly unusual amount of change for one election. Just four years ago, all eight incumbents were re-elected.
It will be interesting to see how smoothly these wholesale changes go, as the newly elected bring in their own people and push their own initiatives.
The argument against term limits has always been that it punishes experience, normally a valuable commodity. One argument for them is that it brings in fresh ideas.
Mississippi is about to have a decent test of whether new faces or old hands are the best way to run the government.
Reeves has opportunity to accomplish
Tate Reeves surprised many with his relatively comfortable 52 percent to 47 percent victory over Democrat Jim Hood in last week’s general election.
The margin for Reeves wasn’t as large as it was for the other six Republicans who won their statewide contests, but it was larger than had been anticipated in this battle between two previously undefeated electoral titans.
Some will credit President Donald Trump’s endorsement and 11th-hour visit to Mississippi as providing Reeves with that last bump. Certainly the president is popular in this highly conservative state. But Trump worked even harder in equally conservative Kentucky, and there the incumbent Republican governor appears to have been edged out.
What was the difference?
Reeves himself.
As a campaigner, he knows the right buttons to push not just to maintain his conservative base but to keep those just right of center from defecting to the other side. He says no on tax increases, no matter how sensible or needed they may be, and pushes for tax cuts, no matter how ill-advised they are. He speaks disrespectfully of Barack Obama and other national Democrats, such as Nancy Pelosi, who couldn’t win a statewide contest in Mississippi either. He exaggerates how well this state is doing under his watch. And even if some Republicans grouse about him behind his back, Reeves has them scared enough that they don’t buck him publicly.
Having demonstrated he knows how to win elections, now the challenge for Reeves is to do something with that power.
He has shot down or ignored most of the big ideas his opponents had — expanding Medicaid, implementing a major road and bridge program, making public pre-kindergarten universal.
Reeves has pledged to get teacher pay up toward the elusive Southeastern average, but after that, it is hard to identify a comprehensive vision from him.
Maybe that will come now.
He said many of the right things during his victory speech, promising repeatedly that as governor he would try to serve all of the state’s people, not just the conservative majority that voted for him.
He will have a tremendous amount of political leverage to employ, with Republicans holding every statewide office for the first time since Reconstruction and maintaining supermajorities in both legislative chambers.
If he avoids hubris, Reeves has the opportunity to accomplish a lot. We wish him success.
