The above map shows, by county, the result of the 2016 presidential election in Mississippi. I suspect it's a lot bluer than most people would have guessed. Clinton carried 26 of the state's 82 counties, and in the single biggest county--Hinds, home of Jackson--she received more than 70% of the vote.
But don't be fooled: Mississippi is a deep red state. The preeminent theme in its voting patterns is summed up in the phrase "racial polarization." The organizing principle of the above map is an election result but you could as well say that it depicts the state's racial demographics. Mississippi is about 38% African-American and the "black belt" is basically the western quarter of the state.
There are different ways of expressing the degree of racial polarization in Mississippi voting, but one of the best might be here, where an NPR table of the county results allows you to order the counties by demographic characteristics. If you choose "race," you will see that the 39 whitest counties all went for Trump, and the 22 blackest all went for Clinton. So that accounts for 61 of 82 counties. Oktibbeha County, in the east central part of the state, is a bit of an outlier--the difference between Clinton's share of the vote (49%) and the African-American part of the population (37%) was wider there than in any other county except Lafayette, which is home to the town of Oxford and the University of Mississippi. The biggest town in Oktibbeha County is Starkville, home to Mississippi State University. Only two Mississippi counties have a higher percentage of college graduates than Oktibbeha, and Clinton eked out a 1-point win there. If Oktibbeha had gone for Trump, he would have carried the 52 whitest counties and lost the 22 blackest. There would then be only eight counties unaccounted for. You might form the hypothesis that those eight counties are the ones in which African-Americans make about 45 to 50 percent of the population, so that the very few whites who vote Democratic have the potential to put the Democrat over the top. And, indeed, the demographic data tend to confirm the hypothesis: the percentage of African-Americans in these eight counties is 47, 47, 47, 48, 48, 50, 51, and 52.
As I type, the polls are open in Mississippi for today's runoff election for US Senate. I've heard commentators say that the campaign has been "racialized" but it would probably be more accurate to say that the miserable campaign of the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, has only delivered the racial divide into plain sight. When I last checked in, Hyde-Smith was prattling about her fondness for "public hangings" in a state with an ugly history of lynching, which so far as I know is the only form of public hanging ever practiced in Mississippi. When African-Americans took offense, she for awhile said nothing, then in a debate read from her notes a perfunctory "apology" that was the functional equivalent of "I'm sorry if you are so stupid as to be offended by my harmless jests." Pictures of her posing with Confederate paraphernalia--the flags and uniforms and "Johnny Reb" hats--then began to circulate. "Mississippi history at its best!" she wrote in a caption for a Facebook post showing herself in the rebel hat holding a rifle. In the past days, we've learned of her attendance, in the 1970s, at Lawrence County Academy, one of the many "segregation academies" set up in Mississippi as a work-around for court ordered integration of the public schools. I suppose the obvious defense would be that she can't be blamed for where her parents decided to send her to school. But then it turns out that she and her husband sent their daughter to Brookhaven Academy, which was established at the same time as Lawrence County Academy and for the same reason. Of course, it's technically illegal to ban African-Americans from attending these schools, but, not too surprisingly given their history and purpose, a ban isn't really necessary. During the 2015-16 school year, there were 392 students enrolled at Brookhaven Academy, and one (1) was African-American. The school is in Lincoln County, which is 31% African-American. Hyde-Smith's daughter graduated last year.
I guess we will see tonight what Mississipians make of all this, if anything. Here is the math for Democrat Mike Espy. If African-American turnout is heavy, they might be able to make themselves, at most, 40 percent of the electorate. However, a rough-and-ready estimate of the percentage of white Mississipians who vote Democratic is ten (10)--no typo, it's 10--and ninety percent of sixty percent is fifty-four percent. Espy needs a lot of white Republican voters to conclude that Hyde-Smith is unacceptable. To this outsider, she appears to have tried valiantly to persuade them, but Mississippi is a different place and she likely knows her people better than I.
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