Brandon Presley & Abortion: Why Democrats Sometimes Have to Look the Other Way

Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley (D-MS)

Tomorrow, America will vote.  Or at least some Americans will vote (most Americans will either skip it or not realize that the bulk of the country has elections tomorrow, even if they're local & nonpartisan).  One of the states that will be voting in a partisan election will be Mississippi, which is holding their gubernatorial elections between Republican Gov. Tate Reeves and Democratic Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley.  The election is somewhat close, though most (including myself) think that Reeves will ultimately win (I'm guessing by 6-8 points).  One issue that both Reeves and Presley agree upon, however, is that they are both anti-choice (I don't use the phrase pro-life because I don't think that it's accurate).  Democrats in the state have wrestled with this, as Presley, as the Democrat, is a member of the party that generally supports abortion rights, but in this case abortion rights activists do not have a major party option on the ballot to side with.  The question here is-is this okay, and given Presley's stand in the polls, if he wins...is this the path forward for red-state Democrats?

Widespread state-by-state polling on abortion is shockingly hard to find, at least accurate polls, but using a 2014 poll on the subject, Mississippi is decidedly anti-choice.  Only 36% of voters in the state in that poll backed abortion rights, while 59% were against them.  Those are pretty devastating numbers, and while it's possible (probable?) that since the ban was enacted the anti-choice vote may have softened a bit (something going from theoretical to reality can do that), I suspect that it's still a pretty sharp dichotomy.  So backing abortion rights statewide in Mississippi comes with peril, possibly making it fatal.

In Mississippi, in fact, while Democrats have held statewide office in the past decade, they haven't held it with a pro-choice candidate.  The last major Democrat in the state to be a vocal supporter of abortion rights was former Governor Ray Mabus, who left office in 1992 (before serving in the Clinton and Obama administrations).  That's over thirty years where the Democrats didn't have a statewide Democrat running in support of abortion rights.  That's not because they didn't run them (former Rep. Mike Espy, for example, ran for the Senate in 2018 and 2020 and backed Roe), but because they don't appear like they can win.

I don't lightly dismiss a Democrat's stance on abortion-I believe that every woman should have the right to do what she wants with her own body, and I generally am not willing to support an anti-choice candidate (it'd be a dealbreaker for me statewide in Minnesota).  But I also am not blind to a strategy that doesn't work.  If the only Democrats that can win in Mississippi since Mabus are anti-choice/pro-life...maybe we roll with that?

Presley would certainly do a lot of good in other ways.  He supports expanding Medicaid using federal funding, and could as governor expand healthcare options to over 200,000 Mississippians on his first day in office.  In a state as poor as the Magnolia State (the poorest in the nation), that could be a huge lifeline.  Presley could help fix the state's broken education system through using recent budget surpluses to fund the growing gap in school funding, as well as investing in infrastructure in the state.  Coming in the wake of last year's water crisis in Jackson (for which Reeves was heavily criticized), having a governor who actually cares about the city and fixing its infrastructure problems would be a big deal.  Mississippi residents have not had a Democratic governor since 2004-that's almost 20 years, and as we've seen in Louisiana & Kansas, having a Democratic governor even with a very conservative state legislature can have profound impact on bread-and-butter issues like education, healthcare, & infrastructure.

I will also be totally honest here-the path to getting abortion rights in Mississippi is going to have to be done at a national level, not a statewide one.  Similar to gay marriage, it's simply too conservative of a state to get it done that way.  Getting abortion rights here will require either a more liberal Supreme Court (a near impossible short-term solution) or by getting the Democrats' a trifecta without Sinema/Manchin holding back the filibuster.  That can happen, but it requires not Democrats in Mississippi coming to the table, but Democrats in Ohio, Montana, Texas, California, New York, & all seven of the major swing states for the White House, as they will decide whether or not Democrats get a trifecta next year.  Mississippi will do its part if that happens (the state's one Democratic congressman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, is on-record as wanting to pass a nationwide bill that would allow abortion rights for all American women), but it's not going to go through the Mississippi gubernatorial election.  Electing Brandon Presley or Tate Reeves won't matter much on abortion rights, but it will on a host of other issues that matter to Mississippians...and if Democrats are smart, they'll understand that's worth more than taking a stand against Presley when he's within striking distance of a victory.