No matter who wins Mississippi’s top two state offices, there’s going to be one all-but-certain outcome from this year’s elections.
Somebody’s taxes are going to be cut.
Tate Reeves and Brandon Presley, the main contenders in the governor’s race, don’t much like each other. Neither do Delbert Hosemann and Chris McDaniel, who are battling for lieutenant governor.
But all four agree that the state’s current surplus is enough to cut taxpayers more slack on top of income-tax cuts that are still being phased in.
Reeves, as he has said for years, isn’t satisfied with reducing the personal income tax. He wants it eliminated. So does McDaniel.
Presley wants the tax relief directed toward consumption, not income. He proposes eliminating the 7% sales tax on groceries — McDaniel’s for that, too — and cutting car tags in half.
Hosemann, always the voice of reason, doesn’t got as far as any of them. But he says, even if the economy turns sour and the rush of funds into the state treasury slows, Mississippi has paid off enough debt and built up a large enough surplus that it should be able to afford reductions to both income and grocery taxes.
I got a chance earlier this month, during the annual meeting in Jackson of the Mississippi Press Association, to hear each of them talk for about a half-hour in succession.
Hosemann was a little on the dry side. McDaniel was a little scary.
As for Reeves and Presley, the only thing more entertaining than hearing them take potshots at each other an hour apart would have been to put them in the room at the same time.
Reeves claims that Presley is a stooge for the radical left, and that the news media in Mississippi have been treating him with kid gloves. Presley says Reeves is a big part of a “deep infection of corruption in state government” and is trying to divert voters from his administration’s failures by getting them hopped up about hot-button issues.
Reeves has certainly had some failures, the biggest being his mule-headed refusal to expand Medicaid in Mississippi to cover the working poor. That nearly 12 years of line-in-the-sand opposition has helped keep Mississippi on the bottom of most health rankings and contributed to the financial crisis that is endangering Greenwood’s hospital and a score of others in this state.
But Mississippi has also had its successes during Reeves’ tenure, and he made a point to rattle off several of them, including a record-low unemployment rate and a double-digit jump in per-capita income.
The governor, though, does frequently play the “culture card.” His favorite one these days is getting people riled up about gender identity. This year, he pushed for and signed legislation — possibly unconstitutional — that would bar minors from gender-affirming treatment, even with their parents’ consent. In 2021, Reeves signed a law to ban transgender athletes from competing on girls’ or women’s sports teams.
“We made it very clear in Mississippi we are going to let girls play girl sports and boys play boy sports,” the governor told the press gathering. What the governor didn’t say is how minor this issue is. I’ve not seen specific numbers for Mississippi, but I’m betting the percentage of teenagers in this state who identify as transgender is less than the estimated national average of 1.4%. And only a fraction of that fraction plays sports or wants medical treatment to help their body conform to what their mind tells them their true gender is.
There are so many bigger issues — health care, corrections, criminal justice, mental health, poverty, population loss, etc. — for this state’s leadership to spend time on and for the press to spend ink on.
As for the lieutenant governor’s race, Hosemann is like the trusted banker or stock broker. You look to him to make solid, rational, unemotional decisions that won’t put you in the poorhouse.
But McDaniel certainly is entertaining. He’s pretty chiseled, and his body language and his delivery remind me of how I imagine this nation’s early founders — fixated on throwing off British rule — bore themselves.
I lost count of how many times he said he doesn’t mean to offend while acknowledging he has a propensity to engage in verbal combat.
He wants to run a government that he inherently doesn’t trust. He portrays himself as a man on a mission whose time is running short to produce a more radical transformation than two decades of Republican rule have been able to effect.
If this election were a party, McDaniel might be the guy you’d bring along to keep things lively. But when it was time to go home, you’d hand the keys to Hosemann.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
