Almost exactly a year ago, Democrats did the unthinkable: They won a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. Doug Jones, a former prosecutor, knocked off Roy Moore, the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice whose Senate run was undone by accusations that he had preyed upon teenage girls. It was a narrow victory, to be sure—20,000 votes, roughly 1.5 percentage points—but still an extraordinary one. It pointed to a possible playbook for Democrats in the deep-red Deep South, albeit a playbook that required a supremely toxic figure like Moore.

In Mississippi’s Senate race, Democrats may have found just such a figure. In a run-off on Tuesday, Mike Espy, a centrist Democrat best known for being the first African-American to serve as secretary of the Agriculture Department, will take on Cindy Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to replace the ailing Thad Cochran in the Senate earlier this year. An Espy win will not be easy. Donald Trump won Mississippi by nearly 20 points in 2016 (though, to be fair, Trump won Alabama by nearly 30). Mississippi has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since the Cold War, when it sent the ardent segregationist Dixiecrat John C. Stennis to Washington for the last of his eight terms. But while it is a long shot, a series of gaffes by Hyde-Smith have given Democrats hope that they can recreate the magic they found in Alabama a year earlier.

Hyde-Smith only narrowly beat Espy in the midterm elections, earning 42 percent of the vote to the Democrat’s 40 percent. (In Mississippi, a runoff is triggered when a candidate does not receive more than 50 percent of the vote.) But her totals were likely driven down by the presence of Trumpist and apparent white nationalist sympathizer Chris McDaniel, who garnered 17 percent of votes. With McDaniel out of the runoff, one can expect his voters to move to Hyde-Smith’s camp.



Hyde-Smith has certainly spent the last few weeks trying to attract them. Less than a week after the midterms, she made some apparently pro-lynching comments at a campaign event. (That’s right: pro-lynching.)

"If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row"- Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith says in Tupelo, MS after Colin Hutchinson, cattle rancher, praises her.



Hyde-Smith is in a runoff on Nov 27th against Mike Espy. pic.twitter.com/0a9jOEjokr — Lamar White, Jr. (@LamarWhiteJr) November 11, 2018

Hyde-Smith’s comments unsurprisingly resulted in a huge wave of criticism. “Hyde-Smith’s decision to joke about ‘hanging,’ when the history of African-Americans is marred by countless incidents of this barbarous act, is sick,” wrote Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP. After Hyde-Smith refused to apologize, a number of corporate donors to her campaign, including Walmart and Union Pacific, demanded their money back.