AP, Jackson, Miss. :
In the last major race of the midterm campaign, Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith claimed victory in Mississippi’s closely watched Senate runoff election, defeating Democrat Mike Espy after a tense campaign rocked by unsettling reminders of the state’s dark history with racism.
Hyde-Smith, a former state senator and state Agriculture secretary, was appointed by Gov. Phil Bryant last spring to fill the seat vacated by ailing Sen. Thad Cochran. Her win Tuesday to serve out the last two years of Cochran’s term made history, as she became the first elected female lawmaker to represent the state in Washington.
But her path to victory wasn’t an easy one, even in this deeply conservative state where no Democrat has won statewide office since 1982. Though Hyde-Smith failed to meet the 50 percent threshold she needed on Nov. 6 to avoid a runoff against Espy, she had been strongly favored to win the election as recently as two weeks ago.
But the election was thrown into disarray after a video clip emerged earlier this month that showed Hyde-Smith praising a cattle rancher at a campaign event in Tupelo by saying if the rancher invited her “to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” To many, the comment invoked images of lynchings – vigilante killings, overwhelmingly of blacks, carried out by mobs as punishment or to terrorize. The NAACP counts 581 lynchings in Mississippi between 1882 and 1968, the most of any state.
That comment was followed by another campaign-trail remark in which she mused about making it “a little more difficult” for “liberal” college kids to vote. A 2014 Facebook photo circulated of her in a Confederate Army hat visiting the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who lived out his final days in Biloxi. Her own history of attending a “segregation academy,” a private school created as an alternative to the integrated public schools, was publicized – and got more attention after it was disclosed that she sent her own daughter to a similar school.
GOP allies urged Hyde-Smith to quickly apologize, but she hesitated, waiting until her one and only debate with Espy to read from a carefully worded statement in which she expressed contrition to “anyone that was offended by my comments.” Under fire, she vanished from the campaign trail until this weekend, where she spoke to small crowds and fiercely avoided reporters who sought to question her about her views on race, at one point literally running out a side door to escape the media.
