JACKSON, Miss. | Voting was relatively easy in many precincts Tuesday as Mississippi residents were voting in the last U.S. Senate race of the midterms, choosing between a white Republican Senate appointee supported by President Donald Trump and a black Democrat who was agriculture secretary when Bill Clinton was in the White House.
History will unfold either way: Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, 59, would be the first woman ever elected to Congress from Mississippi, and Democrat Mike Espy, 64, would be the state’s first African-American U.S. senator since Reconstruction.
A spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office, Leah Rupp Smith, noted that observers from the office were seeing “steady but slow” turnout throughout the state, with few lines.
Espy cast his ballot at a Baptist church in the Jackson suburb of Ridgeland, while Hyde-Smith voted at a volunteer fire department in Brookhaven, about 55 miles south of Jackson.
Mississippi’s history of racist violence became a prevailing theme after a video showed Hyde-Smith praising a supporter in early November by saying, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” She said it was “an exaggerated expression of regard.” More than a week after the video’s release, she said she apologized to “anyone that was offended by my comments,” but also said the remark was used as a “weapon” against her.
Hyde-Smith was seen in a different video talking about making voting difficult for “liberal folks,” and a photo circulated of her wearing a replica Confederate military hat during a 2014 visit to Beauvoir, a beachside museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, that was the last home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
