Mississippi not a 2-party state, professor says

State News

December 2, 2008

Anonymous Picayune Item Tue Dec 02, 2008, 05:19 PM CST

Jackson — Democrats need to sharpen their organization in Mississippi to appeal to a broader swath of voters in statewide races, political scientists say.

“We don’t, in my opinion, have an active, healthy two-party system in this state,” Jackson State University’s Mary Coleman said during a public-affairs luncheon in Jackson.

She said Democratic candidates in Mississippi need to pay attention to young voters — something done successfully by President-elect Barack Obama, who tapped into the Internet’s vast social-networking system to communicate with voters nationwide.

Obama, a Democrat, won the national election on Nov. 4, but lost Mississippi to Republican John McCain. The state has gone Republican in every presidential election since 1980.

Coleman and fellow political scientist Marty Wiseman of Mississippi State University gave their postelection analysis Monday during a luncheon sponsored by the Capitol press corps and MSU’s Stennis Institute of Government.

Wiseman, director of the Stennis Institute, said Democratic Party leaders should be concerned about the loss of former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove to Republican Roger Wicker in a U.S. Senate race last month.

Wiseman said the conventional wisdom in Mississippi is that a Democrat can win a statewide race by getting a strong turnout among black people, who make up about 37 percent of the population, combined with a certain percentage of whites. Musgrove was not successful in doing that, Wiseman said.

Wiseman said that for many Democrats, it is increasingly the case that “you’re going to have to pass by Bennie Thompson’s office” to get elected because Thompson has a strong get-out-the-vote organization in majority-black precincts.

Thompson is the senior member of Mississippi’s U.S. House delegation and is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. He is the state’s only black congressman.

Thompson told The Associated Press last month that he voted for Musgrove for Senate but did not actively try to get voters to the polls. “He never publicly endorsed me the eight times I’ve run for Congress and so I don’t feel like I need to publicly endorse him,” Thompson said.

Jamie Franks, a former state lawmaker who’s now chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party, said Monday that “the Democratic Party is alive and well” and is working to recruit candidates for 2009 municipal elections.

“We have to work on our organization and, at the same time, we have to bring other people in,” Franks said in a telephone interview.

Mississippi Republican Party chairman Brad White said Democrats lost in Mississippi despite having “what should’ve been the perfect storm for them,” including a crumbling economy and an unpopular Republican president.

“I know that the majority of people in Mississippi believe in the conservative philosophy of the Republican Party,” White said.

Still, White said Republicans also are struggling to stick to their principals of small government. He said Mississippi’s two Republican U.S. senators, Wicker and Thad Cochran, voted against the multibillion-dollar bailout for the financial sector, but many Republican lawmakers voted for it.

Mississippi’s elected positions are split between the two major parties. Democrats hold three of the state’s four U.S. House members, and they have a majority in the state House. Democrats also hold more city and county elected positions than Republicans.

Republicans hold seven of the eight statewide elected positions. Democrats hold a 27-25 majority in the state Senate, but the GOP controls the chamber because the Senate’s presiding officer, Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, is a Republican.

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