GAME ON

The die has been cast in the race for control of the Mississippi House of Representatives.  Here are the numbers:

Total seats:  122
Contested seats:  41
Uncontested seats:  81

Uncontested Democratic seats:  40
Uncontested Republican seats:  41

Contested Republican seats:  25
Contested Democratic seats: 10
Contested open seats:  6

The magic number for control of the House is 62.  That means that if Democrats hold serve in their 10 seats (and they likely will), Democrats only have to win 12 of the 31 remaining seats.

The House is in play, ladies and gentlemen.

Was it the income taxes?

Despite over a year of economic courtship, a $1.2B plant is not coming to Mississippi, but has decided to pack up its "office" and head to Louisiana.

According to the Mississippi Business Journal, American Specialty Alloys would have produced 2,000 construction jobs followed with 450 to 650 jobs paying an average of $85,000 a year.

Governor Phil Bryant's good friend Governor Bobby Jindal and the Louisiana Department of Economic Development undercut whatever bill of goods the Mississippi Development Authority was offering. And since MDA basically operates in secret, we may never know if it was the deal, or if it was our education and healthcare systems that scared them off.

While Louisiana is no high-ranker in education and healthcare scores, they do consistently outrank Mississippi, including actual funding of public schools. And, last I checked, Louisiana hasn't passed a bill to eliminate over $1 billion of income from their state's annual budget.

But, MS GOP Chairman Joe Nosef and the Governor, they've got this.

MS voters like Gov. Bryant, but not enough to reelect him, poll shows

GarinHartYang Research Group conducted a poll last week of Mississippi voters, focused on this year's races for Attorney General and Governor.  I outlined the results regarding the Attorney General's race in a previous post, so let's now turn our attention to the results concerning Gov. Phil Bryant.

As this poll was mainly focused on the Attorney General's race, I don't have as much information from the poll on the Governor's race.  What I do have, though, is interesting, and tracks with what internal Democratic polls have found for the past 2 years.

Approval rating

Gov. Bryant is a popular guy.  66% of Mississippians approve of him. But....

Reelection support

While Mississippians might like Gov. Bryant as a person, we are not very enthusiastic about having him serve as governor for another 4 years.  Where nearly 60% of Mississippians want to reelect AG Jim Hood, only 45% of Mississippians want Gov. Bryant to serve another term. Importantly, only 33% of independents would vote to reelect Bryant.  (By contrast, 58% of independents would vote to reelect Hood.)

But who is the opponent?

At this moment, there is no Democrat qualified to run for governor against Phil Bryant.  That is expected to change within the next few days, however. It will be interesting to see how these numbers move after that announcement, and after the campaign begins in earnest.

Poll shows AG Hood to be nearly unbeatable

The GarinHartYang Research Group completed a survey of Mississippi voters last week, and just recently shared their findings regarding this year's race for Attorney General and Governor.

The gubernatorial findings will follow in a second post, but here's what they found regarding Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood:

Approval ratings

• Overall, Hood has a 70% approval rating, and a 14% disapproval rating
• Hood's approval rating among Democrats is 70%
• Hood's approval rating among independents is 64%
• Hood's approval rating among Republicans is 72%

Reelection support

• Nearly 3 of 5 Mississippi voters say they will vote to reelect Hood
• Only 20% of Mississippi voters say they would vote to elect a Republican as AG
• Among Republican voters, 41% of them would vote for Hood, while only 36% would vote for a Republican

Hypothetical race against State Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-Ellisville)

• Chris McDaniel has substantial name ID at 78%
• In a hypothetical head-to-head matchup with McDaniel, Hood has a 62% to 27% lead

Big News out of Oxford

Jay Hughes has qualified as candidate for District 12 legislator. Presumably, he'll face Brad Mayo (R-Oxford) in the general election.

This is big news, that blew up with immediate fanfare after his announcement. Hughes is the current Alderman for Ward 1, and has always been a big education proponent -- even donating his alderman salary to the Oxford Public School endowment. Below is a press release:

Oxford Alderman Jay Hughes Announces Campaign for District 12 Representative

Alderman, Businessman Wants Focus on Public Education

Oxford, Mississippi – Jay Hughes officially announced his candidacy for District 12 of the State House of Representatives when he filed his papers in Jackson on Tuesday. Hughes is the current alderman for Ward 1 in Oxford.

Hughes, a businessman and attorney, said he felt called to enter the race after a series of “troubling” votes on education by the district’s incumbent and other members of the state legislature.

“Mississippi has been last on too many lists for too long, and we cannot move up without an assertive effort to improve our public education system.” Instead, Hughes continued, the legislature has been “moving backward” with votes that consistently undermine the state’s public schools.

“I could not sit by idly while the issues that matter to this district were largely ignored; we are in need of new leadership.” said Hughes. “It all starts with education.”

# # # #

Undermining the public's intent with public education

Tomorrow morning at 10 a.m., the Mississippi House of Representatives will vote on an alternative initiative to the education funding ballot initiative that over 100,000 Mississippians signed on for last year.

This deliberate act led by Republican leaders to confuse and undermine the public’s intent is quite perplexing after Governor Bryant's strong declaration a few weeks ago that the public is in charge education in Mississippi.

Perhaps it is the large number of constituents who are employed or have children educated through public schools, or perhaps they took the Governor’s earlier mantra to heart, but about 13 Republican legislators have indicated they are opposed to the alternative language.

Speaker Philip Gunn, however, needs these 13 votes for Tuesday morning. According to sources, these 13 Republican legislators were taken into the Speaker’s office one-by-one and told they would lose their chairmanships and have $100,000 spent on their primary opponent against them this year. The backer of this $1.3 million? A candidate for office from Madison County with substantial financial resources.

This will be the first time in Mississippi history that the legislature has proposed an alternative to a ballot initiative by the people. If the people are in charge of education in our state, then the people should be voting on the initiative as they signed off on it. But instead, the Legislature is sending Speaker Pro Tempore Greg Snowden around to tell folks that they’ve met their "promises," and intentionally misleading the public through an alternative to the initiative.

Educating our children is a promise that has not been met - it is a necessity to improving our state. It is a necessity to turn around our continuous abysmal performance on every list imaginable, from the highest rates of incarceration to the worst places for business.

It is absurd to think that Speaker Gunn, arguably the most powerful elected leader, is threatening his moderate Republicans in order to cater to Tea Party reactionaries who do not understand that everyone suffers when we do not invest in our greatest asset - Mississippians.

Ladies: Don't Lose Your Right to Vote

Ladies - listen up! If you are recently married or divorced and have changed your name, you will not be allowed to vote if your name in the voter registration poll books doesn’t match your ID. And, the Republicans (or "conservative county leaders") will be looking for you, as David pointed out in his recent post about a manual on how to suppress voting using voter ID.

Let's add my name to Jeppie's list of potential voters:

My registration lists Kate Marie Jacobson, but my new married name is Kate Jacobson Dutro. No voting for me.

But why in the world would they want to prevent little old me from voting? It couldn’t be because they are trying to get personhood back on the ballot in 2015, and women (and many men) soundly defeated that ridiculous measure already?

According to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, it was estimated only 66% of women have an ID with their current legal name. So ⅓ of women could be knocked out from voting on election day - including me.

I’ll have my business in order on Election Day - these guys aren't going to stop me from voting. Ladies - they are playing politics with your rights in the personhood initiative by putting it on the 2015 ballot, and they are playing politics with your rights and countless others rights to vote with voter ID.

Jeppie Barbour's "Dog Whistle" Email Suggests New Ways to Stop Voters in Mississippi

Every once in a while, something comes across our desks that throws one of us in a funk. Like many Mississippians, even Cottonmouth writers would like to think that we've moved forward as a state. In many ways we truly have.

But today we've come across an email that is particularly troubling to me. In an open transmission to conservative leaders across Mississippi, Jeppie Barbour (Former Governor Haley Barbour's brother & former mayor of Yazoo City) sent out a list of explanations regarding some of the more...confusing aspects of Mississippi's newly implemented Voter ID law. In it, he explains how photo identification can (should?) be used as an "application of good faith", and that the rules are essentially left to the poll workers for interpretation.

For example, Barbour encourages his allies to change their IDs, so that they exactly match that of the poll books:

Let’s look at examples. There’s the voter registration name and the driver’s license name.


            Johnny Smith and John Taylor Smith

            Mary Wilson Jones and Mary Jones Howard (She’s gotten married or re-married).

            J. L. Jackson and John Louis Jackson

            Mrs. Betty Bond and Betty Anderson Bond


Make your own decision on these people but remember that you don’t get a say at the polls. People who have these two names are at the mercy of the poll workers. Even honest poll workers will turn down some of these.

But not only does this email lay out a very specific set of instructions on how to follow the law, it also highlights it's deliberately confusing arbitrary rules, and explains to poll workers how easy it is to drop someone off of the voter rolls.

One of the more stunning admissions comes a few paragraphs down:

That will mean that we have a good faith application of the law but people whose names are just a little different can not be sure that they’ll get to vote.

There are other people who can be very sure that they WILL NOT be allowed to vote. They won’t vote unless they re-register.

Read the whole thing after the jump, presented to you in full. It might just make your head explode.



To:          Conservative county leaders

From:      Jeppie Barbour

Subject:  Voting under the new Voter ID