The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

We haven't talked that much about the final Senate race of 2018, the contest for retired Republican Sen. Thad Cochran's old seat in Mississippi.  Cochran retired on April 1 and GOP Gov. Phil Bryant appointed Cindy Hyde-Smith to the Senate, which set up a fight last week between Hyde-Smith and Tea Party darling Rep. Chris McDaniel.  

Smith won, but former Clinton Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy came in second, and McDaniel's presence forced a runoff between Smith and Espy as neither got more than 50% of the vote.  All that means a runoff two weeks from Tuesday where apparently Hyde-Smith is already letting everyone know just how politics are done in the Magnolia State.

Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who is facing a November 27 runoff election in Mississippi against Democrat Mike Espy, joked with supporters earlier this month about attending a “public hanging.” A video of the remark, which she made at a campaign stop in Tupelo on November 2, was shared on social media Sunday morning by Bayou Brief journalist Lamar White Jr. In the video, after hearing praise from a supporter, Hyde-Smith jokes that “if he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be in the first row.”

Hyde-Smith and Espy — who in 1987 became the first black Mississippian to be elected to Congress since Reconstruction, and later became the first black secretary of agriculture under President Clinton — were the two candidates who received the most votes in a four-person special election on Tuesday. Since no candidate received a majority of votes, the result triggered a runoff election between the top two. Hyde-Smith was appointed by Mississippi governor Phil Bryant to replace ailing senator Thad Cochrane back in April, but still had to win the special election to serve out the remaining two years of Cochrane’s term.

Mississippi, as the Jackson Free-Press explains in its report on Hyde-Smith’s comments, has a singularly terrible history when it comes to lynchings, racism, and the oppression of black Americans:

Between 1877 and 1950, Mississippi had the highest number of lynchings of African Americans of any state in the United States, just as the state had been the wealthiest from slavery before the Civil War, and then later passed the most onerous laws after Reconstruction to stop black people from voting and gain equal rights in the state.

Across Mississippi, 654 lynchings were reported in that period, including two in Lee County, where Hyde-Smith’s comments were made. Lynchings — extrajudicial mob justice used to intimidate African Americans — were usually done by hanging, often in front of crowds of joyous whites who even mailed postcards with lynching photographs to friends and family.

Sure is funny when white people in Mississippi joke about public lynchings when running against a black candidate, huh.

Mike Espy is not exactly favored to win, but after this, I'm betting a lot of people motivated to vote in that runoff might want to make their opinion of Cindy Hyde-Smith very clear at the runoff ballot box.

This is the who the GOP is, folks.

And this is who supports the GOP, the people who think her remark was "fine" and "no big deal".

Don't call the racists though, they don't like that.