Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Is Greenville Mayor Heather McTeer Hudson really running against Rep. Bennie Thompson?

It certainly appears so. MajorityInMS.com broke the story yesterday. Rep. Thompson is enormously popular in MS-2, and running against him appears to be a suicide mission. Rep. Thompson has given no indication whatsoever that he is not seeking a 9th term. A 2nd District legislator, when asked to evaluate Mayor Hudson's move against Rep. Thompson was not kind.

Thinking through this, perhaps Mayor Hudson has been given some sort of signal by Rep. Thompson that he's not running for reelection. Back in February, Mayor Hudson announced that she would not be seeking a third term as mayor. Speculation was rampant that she was looking at running for the Democratic nomination for Lt. Gov., but her filing papers never appeared on deadline day. Turns out that nomination would have been hers if she'd wanted it as other potential candidates, like former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, begged off at the last minute. So does that mean that she got some sort of tip from Rep. Thompson that she needed to forego the Lt. Gov. race and qualify for MS-2? I doubt it, as Rep. Thompson has been, as MajorityInMS.com put it, raising money like he needs it.

This will be interesting, I'm sure. Stay tuned....

1 comment:

tom said...

The fact that no Democratic candidate is running for lieutenant governor really bugs the hell out of me. Had I known the field was empty, I would have run myself—just on the off chance the Republican nominee has a last-minute sex scandal or something. There's no excuse for not fielding at least one Democratic candidate for every statewide office.