Democrats in Mississippi are hoping to pull off an upset in the November 27 Senate runoff election between GOP nominee Sen. Cyndy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) and Democrat nominee former Rep. Mike Espy (D-MS).
This is precisely what they did in the Alabama special Senate election in December of last year when Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) narrowly defeated embattled GOP nominee Roy Moore.
In the three-way election to complete the remaining two years of Sen. Thad Cochran’s term last Tuesday, Hyde-Smith, who was appointed by Gov. Phil Bryant to the seat in April after Cochran’s resignation, finished in first place with 41 percent, Espy finished in second place with 40 percent, and State Senator Chris McDaniel, the Tea Party favorite who narrowly lost the 2014 GOP runoff primary election to Cochran, finished in third with 16 percent.
Though Hyde-Smith is favored to win the runoff, her campaign ran into turbulence late Sunday after a comment she made on the campaign trail was posted on Twitter and her opponent quickly jumped on it, as Politico reported:
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), running for election against an African-American man, joked in a video posted online that if she were invited by one of her supporters to a “public hanging,” she would be in “the front row.”– READ MORE