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Dems' road to 60-vote majority goes into Miss.
 | Video: Decision '08 |
Turning Point: 2008 Nov. 5: NBC's Tom Brokaw recaps the historic election of America's first black president. Produced by msnbc.com's Kevin Flynn. |
Decision '08 Election Night video |
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‘The most nervous incumbent’
“If Roger Wicker is that detached from what is happening in Mississippi, then he is in worse shape than we all thought,” responded Adam Bozzi, spokesman for the Musgrove campaign. (Musgrove himself was unavailable for an interview.)
“Roger Wicker is probably the most nervous incumbent in the history of Mississippi Senate races because he has a 14-year failed record in Washington and Mississippians know he is part of the problem in Washington,” Bozzi said.
He added, “Roger Wicker has been in Washington and things have gotten worse. No solution to gas prices. No solution to immigration. No solution to health care. High unemployment. Gridlock on every important issue. And now a fiscal crisis and a $700 billion bailout.”
But Wicker voted against the bailout, arguing that Congress was acting with undue haste.
He said in early October, “We were told two weeks ago that unless we acted immediately, within hours the sky was going to fall. Well, the sky didn’t fall. Even so, we have rushed this through.”
No analyst in Mississippi or elsewhere expects Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama to carry this state. But Obama is trying to have an influence here, perhaps trying to help Musgrove.
At the top of the local evening news on Jackson station WAPT Wednesday night, an Obama ad aired — a sign of how much money the Obama campaign has to lavish on the broadcast war, even here in Mississippi.
Measuring the potential Obama effect
Obama will almost certainly perform better than Democratic nominee John Kerry did in 2004, when he got only 39.8 percent of the Mississippi vote.
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Rogelio V. Solis / AP Roger Wicker, right, and Ronnie Musgrove. |
“Ronnie is certainly going to get more white votes than Obama will, I would think,” he said. “If he gets the base of the turnout for Obama, I can’t see him not winning.”
Democratic activist Jaye Espy, who hails from Clarksdale, a town in 70 percent African-American Coahoma County near the Mississippi River, said, “People are very excited. You can’t talk to anybody (in Clarksdale) who is not excited. The energy is infectious.”
Kerry got 6,805 votes, or 64 percent, in Coahoma County in 2004. Obama and Musgrove should do far better, winning perhaps 8,000 votes in the county, Espy said.
Black voters accounted for an estimated 34 percent of the Mississippi electorate in the 2004 presidential election, according to exit poll interviews. Kerry won nine out of ten of Mississippi black voters in 2004.
If enthusiasm for Obama were to drive the black turnout to, say, 38 percent of the Mississippi electorate, and if almost all black voters were to cast their ballots for Obama and Musgrove, then Musgrove could win the election by garnering as little as 26 percent of white voters.
Reminded that 23,000 new voters had registered since January in predominantly African-American and heavily Democratic Hinds County, the state’s largest county, Wicker replied, “I think you’ll also see a new voter registration boom in places like DeSoto County which is the fastest growing Republican county in the state. I think Sen. Obama has created a lot of enthusiasm on both sides. A lot of people will turn out to vote for him — and a lot of people will turn out to vote for Sen. McCain — and it’ll probably be a wash.”
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