Betting on Tuesday’s final midterms showdown – the Mississippi senatorial run-off
The contest that’s evoking look backs to the Civil War
It might be 3 weeks since the US midterm elections but there is a lot still to be settled. One of the interesting features from a British perspective is that some States seem to take an enormously long time to actually count the votes and not all the California seats in the house have been resolved yet.
Meanwhile in the state of Mississippi with its long history of difficult race relations there is a Senate runoff on Tuesday which has a evoked lots of memories and images of the past which the Democrats are trying to exploit. This from NBC.
They see an opening – however small – after the Democratic party’s special election victory in Alabama last year. A comment by the GOP incumbent, Hyde-Smith campaign about attending a “public hanging” while running against her black opponent raised the state’s history of lynching. This has put her on the defensive in the campaign’s final weeks.
That the runoff is taking place on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving has raised doubts about turn out on either side. Inevitably there’s been little campaigning activity. It is like holding a Westminster by-election just two days after Boxing Day.
The runoff is happening because no one candidate achieved 50% of the vote on November 6th and maybe, just maybe, in all the circumstances the Democrats might just have a fighting chance.
The campaign has been characterised by lots of look backs to the state’s history. The latest from CNN was that the GOP contender “once promoted a measure that praised a Confederate soldier’s effort to ‘defend his homeland’ and pushed a revisionist view of the Civil War”
I’ve been trying to find a suitable bet on the longshot Democrats and have got 13 to 1 on Betfair that the Republicans overall will win 52 seats in this year’s senate election. That will be their total if there is a shock in Mississippi.