Can Brandon Presley Shake Up Mississippi Politics?

The candidate’s approach is rooted in grassroots politics of a sort that has disappeared in many parts of the country—Howorth calls it “old-fashioned Southern populism, but without the bigotry.” The candidate shows up in the crossroads towns that he refers to as “little dots on the map just struggling to stay there.” And he commiserates with people who have grown disengaged from both parties in a state that routinely has the worst poverty rate, the lowest household income level, and the shortest life expectancy in the nation. For his part, Presley tells stories about his own hardscrabble upbringing. In his childhood home, he says, “we could see through the floor, straight down to the dirt.” But he’s doing more than writing the lyrics for a country song. He’s making pledges to stand up to corporate special interests and rate-gouging insurance companies, to accept Medicaid funding in order to expand access to health care, and to keep rural hospitals open at a time when the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform estimates that 27 of Mississippi’s 74 rural hospitals are at risk of closing. The focus on health care is critical, as almost one in seven Mississippians say they don’t seek medical care because of the cost. Surveys by the Commonwealth Fund have determined that as many as 230,000 Mississippians would sign up for Medicaid if the state expanded benefits.

Presley’s robust candidacy has made the governor’s race in Mississippi one of the most intriguing contests in an off-year election cycle that will provide important signals about where the country is headed as the 2024 presidential election approaches. National media outlets are already engaged in obsessive coverage of what they anticipate will be a repeat contest between President Joe Biden and the legally embattled Republican he displaced in 2020. Yet this fall will see elections for the governorships in three Southern and border states, all of which are seen as Trump country but have more nuanced politics than surface impressions might suggest. Two of them currently have Democratic governors. In Louisiana, where the socially conservative Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards is term-limited, Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry and former Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development secretary Shawn Wilson, a Democrat who has the backing of Edwards and US Representative Troy Carter, are the top contenders going into a crowded October 14 open primary that will determine whether Landry and Wilson face each other in a November 18 runoff. Polls generally give Landry the upper hand. But in Kentucky, popular Democratic Governor Andy Beshear led Republican challenger Daniel Cameron by 10 points in a Public Opinion Strategy poll in late June. Both parties plan to pour major resources into the Kentucky contest this fall and also into the fight for control of Virginia’s legislative chambers.

Still, Presley’s campaign is one that could force Democrats to think more broadly about where their party is competitive—and, perhaps, to revisit the “50-state strategy” that former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean popularized in the mid-2000s. Dean argued then that the party needed to compete everywhere—not just to win but to achieve governing majorities that could transform lives. “Given where the Republican Party has gone—where they fundamentally don’t believe in democracy, and where they are working against the interests of the vast majority of Americans—it’s simply better to have a Democrat in office,” Dean told me when we discussed the Mississippi race. “The challenge is that Democrats have had a hard time in some of these states for so long that a lot of people have just given up hope. That makes it harder to raise money, harder to get turnout up.”

Dean’s concern is shared by Ruth Ball, the president of the NAACP branch in northern Mississippi’s Lafayette County, where she also serves as vice chair for the local Democratic Party. “A lot of people just feel that their vote doesn’t matter,” Ball said as she described Mississippi’s transition from a state run by Jim Crow segregationist Democrats to one where Trump Republicans are in charge. “That creates so much apathy. Too many people who are on the Democratic side just don’t vote. It’s just become harder and harder for Democrats to win.”

In the 2022 midterm elections, Mississippi had the lowest turnout in the nation—roughly 32 percent. That’s not an accident. Nearly six decades after the Voting Rights Act became law, Mississippi’s election systems are defined not only by the ghosts of the state’s Jim Crow past, but also by the contemporary manifestations of a racist voter suppression strategy that national Republicans have made their calling card. Plenty of states have seen “barriers” to voting erected by GOP governors and legislators. But Mississippians face what local activists argue are the most daunting roadblocks in the country. In addition to an aggressive felony disenfranchisement law, which in 2020 denied voting rights to 16 percent of the adult Black population in the state, Mississippi has one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country and no clear system for early voting. “Mississippi is very behind,” says Nsombi Lambright-Haynes, the executive director of One Voice in Mississippi, a nonprofit group that, among its other social justice work, promotes voter participation in marginalized and vulnerable communities. “Mississippi does not have online voter registration; many individuals do not receive their registration card, which tells them where to vote; we also have an antiquated absentee ballot process.”

While the decay of democratic processes is generally bad for Mississippians, it’s been especially rough on Democrats. This has created a situation where, in the words of Curtis Wilkie, Mississippi Democrats “are used to losing elections but stick around on principle.”

That’s not unheard of in the United States. But the fact that the odds are stacked against Democrats definitely impacts voter turnout, Ball says. “You just have to understand that, at this point, to be a Democrat in Mississippi is a disadvantage in itself. You used to have to run as a Democrat. You had no choice—if you weren’t a Democrat, you couldn’t get elected,” she explains, recalling when Jim Crow Mississippi was part of the Democratic Party’s “solid South.” “Now, you can hardly get elected as a Democrat.”

Yet Ball and her allies in the Lafayette County Democratic Party aren’t giving up. They’re excited about Presley’s candidacy and have their own slate of local candidates this year, including Don Mason, a retired University of Mississippi School of Law professor and the former associate director of the National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law, who is running for a county supervisor post. Why take on a local race as a Democrat in a county where Republicans have been surging and where even Mason’s friends have encouraged him to avoid the “D” label and run as an independent? “When it came down to it,” Mason says, “I decided I could not turn my back on the Democratic Party…. If we turn away and just let things collapse, in these times, I really do think we could lose everything.” Mason’s point is echoed by Howard Dean. The former DNC chair says that wanting Democrats to do well in Mississippi is not merely a matter of feel-good partisanship: “I just don’t know how long it’s going to take for Democrats in Washington to recognize that they can’t win the kind of majorities they need in Congress without starting to win in some of these states where the party has been losing ground in recent years. You have to get people elected to the state Legislature and to state offices, because those are the people who eventually run for the House and the Senate. Getting things right in the states is essential to getting it right in Washington.”

The whole “red state” versus “blue state” calculus has become so entrenched that presidential elections are now decided in a handful of so-called “battleground states,” while the rest are simply presumed to be locked in for one party or the other. The campaigning, organizing, and funding that defines a presidential race will go into those competitive states—such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin —and it’s the same with fights for key US Senate seats. The remaining states are generally neglected by the weaker party, with candidates often left to their own devices and political will. We’re often told that decisive, truly national victories—like the wins that Franklin Roosevelt secured in the 1930s and that Lyndon Johnson had in 1964—are a thing of the past. Unfortunately, if that’s the case, so, too, are the prospects for the sort of governing majorities that allowed FDR to deliver the New Deal and LBJ to pursue the Great Society.

Brandon Presley likes to refer to himself as an “FDR Democrat,” which is not unheard of in the South. But he also talks up LBJ’s seminal accomplishments, especially the Voting Rights Act, and he quotes from speeches the 36th president delivered amid the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. While Roosevelt won Mississippi four times, Johnson lost the state in 1964, after he signed the Civil Rights Act in July of that year and told White House press secretary Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” Johnson was more or less right. Of the 11 states that once formed the Democratic Party’s “solid South,” only two backed Joe Biden for the presidency in 2020: Virginia and Georgia. Those also happen to be the two Southern states that send Democrats to the Senate. Every Southern state except Louisiana and North Carolina has a Republican governor, and as Chris Kromm, the executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, has explained, “Republicans may not have enjoyed big victories like many expected in the 2022 midterm elections, but the predicted ‘red wave’ did materialize in at least one critical arena—Southern state legislatures.” Of the 22 old “solid South” legislative chambers, Democrats hold just one: the Virginia Senate.

So what makes people think Presley could win? It’s not just those credible poll numbers. “What Brandon’s got going for him is that he has a very good record with the Public Service Commission,” Wilkie says. “That’s where the populism comes in. He has just kicked ass with the telephone companies and the utility companies on behalf of the little people. The poor people were getting screwed over by the powerful utilities, and Brandon took them on—not unlike Huey Long took on the oil companies in Louisiana.”

No less a progressive populist than former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower shares Wilkie’s assessment, describing Presley as “an unabashed working-class Democrat with a program of for-the-people reforms and an anti-plutocrat campaign for governor [who] has already pulled even with the right-wing incumbent!”

That has clearly rattled Reeves. Facing a more competitive race than anyone imagined, and conscious of the polling that shows that one in five Republicans could cross over to back Presley, the governor has been borrowing full chapters from the political playbooks of Donald Trump and Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. “My friends,” Reeves told supporters in May, “this is a different governor’s campaign than we have ever seen before in our state, because we are not up against a local-yokel Mississippi Democrat. We are up against a national liberal machine. They are extreme. They are radical and vicious.”

The problem with this line of attack is that Presley doesn’t fit the stereotype that Reeves and the Republicans are trying to depict. While he’s more than ready to take on the power companies and heartless bureaucrats with a populist zeal that can echo Harry Truman at his best, it’s hard to paint this Democrat into a corner with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. “He’s got a rural background and talks like rural people,” says Wilkie, who has known Presley for a decade. “So he can’t be branded with all that bullshit about not being from here.” It’s not just the accent; it’s what Presley says on several issues where he splits with D.C. Democrats. He’s “all in on the Second Amendment.” And when asked about abortion rights, he responds with a line that would knock him out of the Democratic primary race in any number of battleground states: “Being pro-life is not only about protecting the unborn—and I’m for that. But it’s also caring about the ones that are born, that are here, that are suffering in a rural community today in the grips of addiction.” Pinning Presley down on precisely where he stands with regard to abortion rights is tough. He says he’s “in the mainstream of Mississippi political thought on this.” But what does that mean exactly? “I believe there should be exceptions in the law for rape, incest, and the life of the mother,” he replies.

“But what about the ban, commissioner?” he was asked on WLOX-TV in Biloxi. “Can you commit to a 12-week, a 15-week ban that you would think would be appropriate in Mississippi?” “That’s up to the Legislature,” Presley responded, dodging. Instead, he called for a “pro-hospital, pro-emergency-room, pro-doctor, pro-Medicaid-expansion” agenda that would “care about families, and babies once they are born.” He also threw in a dig at his opponent: “Tate Reeves cares about you until you’re born, and then he doesn’t care anything about you after that.”

At a time when enthusiasm about protecting abortion rights has mobilized young voters and boosted Democratic fortunes even in red-tinged states like Kansas and Kentucky, Presley’s self-identification as a “pro-life” Democrat—similar to the stance of Governor Edwards in Louisiana—puts him at odds with the party’s platform and the majority of the American public, which supports the legal right to abortion in the United States. It’s also hard to imagine that committed anti-abortion voters will back the candidate over Reeves, who declares that the state will always be “a beacon on the hill, a symbol of hope for the country, and a model for the nation” when it comes to banning abortion.

The Democrats I spoke with for this story tended to disagree with Presley’s position on the issue, in some cases quite passionately. And although Pew Research Group polling shows that 59 percent of Mississippians say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, there are plenty of pro-choice voters in the state that prompted the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Fifty-one percent of residents polled after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022 disagreed with the outcome, which upheld the state’s 15-week abortion ban and cleared the way for a trigger law to take effect, banning most abortions in the state two weeks after the Supreme Court issued its ruling.

Even if they disagree with Presley on some issues, however, Mississippi Democrats told me they’re enthusiastic about his candidacy.

Ball says that the critical health care issue for Mississippians of all races, but especially for Black Mississippians, is the expansion of Medicaid, which Reeves absolutely opposes and Presley absolutely supports. “That’s a no-brainer,” she says. “We are the poorest state in the union. The [Republican] attitude against the poor in this state is a real issue. And Brandon Presley is on the right side of it. He knows that Medicaid expansion has real meaning for voters. You have towns all over this state with no hospital, no doctor, no nurse. You have people who have to go 75 miles for help and then hope they’ll be accepted because they have no health insurance.” Presley zeroed in on rural health issues when he responded to Reeves’s State of the State address in January with a fiery rebuke—delivered “from inside a closed-down emergency room in a shut-down hospital” in the predominantly Black city of Newton—in which he declared:

Every time we close a rural hospital, folks have to drive farther and farther to see a doctor, and the true, sad fact is that some will die. This is the reality that Tate Reeves has chosen to put us in. Make no mistake, he has made this choice. We have a solution. By extending Medicaid to the working people of our state, we can keep hospitals across Mississippi from experiencing the same fate as this one. All Tate Reeves has to do is lift his hand, take an ink pen, and sign on a line. Instead, he lacks the backbone, and he will sit on his hands while people lose their jobs, some lose their lives, and our hospitals close. When Tate Reeves finally wakes up and asks why hospitals are closing, he should look in the mirror.

That’s just the sort of message Curtis Wilkie thinks could elect a Democrat in Mississippi. “Brandon Presley’s by far the best Democratic candidate we’ve seen running a statewide race in years,” Wilkie says. “He’s got a shot. It’s a long shot, but it’s a shot. The key is the Black vote. If the Black vote is energized, and if enough white voters decide that they’re sick of Tate Reeves, it could happen.”

And if it happens in Mississippi for Elvis Presley’s Democratic second cousin, then American politics could, in fact, be all shook up.