Mississippi Republican voters are still standing firmly with former President Donald Trump, according to a new Mississippi Today/Siena College poll.
When poll respondents were asked which candidate they would vote for if a presidential primary were held today, Trump garnered support from 57% of Mississippi Republicans, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had support from 34%. Just 8% of the Republicans surveyed were undecided.
However, among Mississippi independents, who often vote in Republican primaries, DeSantis carried a plurality of support with 44% over Trump’s 34%. An additional 18% of independents surveyed were undecided, and 5% chose “someone else.”
Editor’s note: Poll methodology and crosstabs can be found at the bottom of this story. Click here to read more about our partnership with Siena College Research Institute.
Trump enjoys a 78% favorability rating among Mississippi Republicans, according to the poll, with 17% of Republicans finding him unfavorable. Just 4% responded they didn’t know enough to say, and 1% refused to answer the question.
DeSantis has a 61% favorability rating among Mississippi Republicans, with 10% of Republicans finding him unfavorable. A sizable 28% of Mississippi Republicans responded they didn’t know enough to say, and 1% refused.
When factoring in independents and Democrats, though, Trump’s total approval rating dips drastically to 42%, with 53% of voters finding the former president unfavorable. DeSantis’ approval rating also dips when factoring in independents and Democrats: 37% of the state finds DeSantis favorable, 27% find him unfavorable, and 33% say they don’t know enough about him to decide.
Democratic President Joe Biden, expectedly, does not enjoy high marks among Mississippi voters.
Biden has a 39% approval rating in the state, while 57% of respondents find him unfavorable, according to the poll. A drastic partisan split is factored into the average: 81% of Democrats find Biden favorable, while 16% find him unfavorable; 9% of Republicans find Biden favorable, while 89% of Republicans find him unfavorable; and just 29% of independents find Biden favorable, while 65% find him unfavorable.
Separately, when poll respondents were asked which candidate they think was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election, 52% of the state said Biden was the legitimate winner over Trump. Two-thirds (66%) of Mississippi Republicans think Trump won the 2020 election, while just 20% of Republican respondents think Biden did.
A 52% majority of Mississippi’s white respondents — including survey participants of all parties, not just Republicans — said they thought Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election.
Respondents to the poll were also asked: “Thinking about the state of our democracy, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of our country?” Exactly 50% of all respondents said they were pessimistic about the future, including 65% of Republicans, 60% of independents, and 29% of Democrats.
Just 44% of all respondents said they were optimistic about the future, including 30% of Republicans, 32% of independents, and 65% of Democrats.
The Mississippi Today/Siena College Research Institute poll of 821 registered voters was conducted Jan. 8-12 and has an overall margin of error of +/- 4.6 percentage points. Siena has an A rating in FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of pollsters.
Mississippi Today has partnered with Siena College Research Institute, ranked among the nation’s most reputable and accurate polling firms, for a series of surveys between now and the November 2023 statewide election.
Mississippi is just one of three states featuring governor’s races in 2023. Additionally, the other seven statewide offices and all 174 legislative seats are up for grabs in November.
Mississippi Today’s partnership with Siena College will provide Mississippians a regular and thorough understanding of where their peers stand on candidates, key issues and quality of life — the first such series of public surveys during a statewide election year here since at least 1999.
“The Siena College Research Institute (SCRI) is thrilled to work with Mississippi Today to measure how Mississippians feel about current critical state issues, Mississippi’s leaders and the quality of life in Mississippi,” said Dr. Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute. “SCRI has conducted national polling and surveys in many individual states in order listen to the views of Americans and to provide unbiased data to every citizen. We welcome this opportunity to work with Mississippi Today to give voice to Mississippians and to advance mutual understanding.”
The first poll of the series was in the field the first week of January, and Mississippi Today will publish key findings beginning this week. Here’s what readers can expect from us over the next few days:
Tuesday, Jan. 17: Where Mississippians stand on the 2024 presidential race, including how Republicans feel about former President Donald Trump and emerging potential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. We also explore how Mississippians feel about the job President Joe Biden is doing, the future of democracy in the U.S., and who they think legitimately won the 2020 presidential election.
Wednesday, Jan. 18: Where Mississippians stand on the state’s health care crisis, including its dozens of hospitals on the verge of closing. We explore Mississippians’ views on potential solutions to the crisis, including additional legislative funding and Medicaid expansion.
Thursday, Jan. 19: Where Mississippians stand on the 2023 governor’s race and how they feel about the work of current Gov. Tate Reeves.
Friday, Jan. 20: Where Mississippians stand on the work of their legislative leaders and the Mississippi Legislature as a whole, as well as some key issues lawmakers are debating between no and the end of the 2023 legislative session.
Week of Jan. 23: Where Republicans, Democrats and independents agree on certain issues, plus the major divide in opinion about quality of life between Mississippians of different backgrounds.
“We think it’s critical that Mississippians understand where their neighbors stand on major problems facing our state, ideas about how to improve those problems, and the various elected officials and candidates who propose those ideas,” said Adam Ganucheau, Mississippi Today’s editor-in-chief. “We sought to partner with SCRI because of their commitment to fairness and accuracy. All we seek, as ever, is the truth of what’s happening in our state. We will be completely transparent about methodology and focused on what the results mean for the 2023 legislative session, the 2023 statewide elections and beyond.”
Levy offered some advice for those who may be contacted this year by pollsters.
“If we call you from Siena, please take a few minutes to participate in the survey,” Levy said. “You may enjoy it and at the same time, you may make Mississippi a little better for you and your neighbors.”
Note: This analysis was first published in Mississippi Today’s weekly legislative newsletter. Subscribe to our free newsletter for exclusive early access to legislative analyses and up-to-date information about what’s happening under the Capitol dome.
Think back to grade school and Mississippi civics lessons about our representative form of government. The steps of passing laws at the state level are simple, uniform and designed to give voters — not the representatives they elect — all the power:
Voters of all backgrounds and viewpoints in every area of the state elect lawmakers to represent their interests in Jackson.
Those lawmakers join their colleagues at the Capitol once a year to partake in a very detailed lawmaking and budgeting process designed to give everyone an equal shot at passing or debating bills.
That lawmaking process is completely open to the public, ensuring complete transparency and that those representatives are, indeed, representing the voting public’s interests — that nothing untoward is happening behind closed doors.
Bills are passed into law based on a majority vote (or three-fifths vote for spending bills), ensuring that at least a majority of people across Mississippi have a true representative say in the lawmaking process.
What a great way to do the public’s business, right? Unfortunately, in Mississippi, this civics lesson is nothing more than a farce — a bright-eyed fantasy about how things perhaps should work. Many understand how broken the legislative process has become in Washington, but it’s arguably worse in Jackson.
The reality is that it’s never worked the way we’ve been taught. And a progressively more broken system of lawmaking has been implemented over the past 12 years by Republican legislative leaders who, with sweeping rules changes and unchecked power grabs, have created the grandest illusion in state politics: that our old civics lesson is reality.
Here’s how lawmaking really works inside your state Capitol:
Voters in every area of the state do elect lawmakers, but the districts are carefully drawn by Republican leaders every 10 years to ensure that only Republican voters’ beliefs are represented at the Capitol — that a GOP supermajority (three-fifths of both the House and Senate) have votes to pass any bill they want and can maintain complete power in Jackson. This doesn’t just suppress the ideals of Democrats across the state, but it also hurts Republicans who represent more moderate or more conservative districts than the GOP establishment leadership.
The specific lawmaking process still on the books has been completely tossed aside for a newer, unwritten process. Are you a Democratic lawmaker? You’re completely powerless inside the Capitol and your views mean nothing. Are you a Republican representing a more moderate district with voters who disagree with a lot of things the most conservative party leaders believe? You’re even more powerless at the Capitol. Major pieces of legislation typically aren’t unveiled until the eleventh hour, and Republican leaders use hard deadlines to give rank-and-file members of both parties virtually no time to read or understand what they’re voting on. If they don’t vote with leadership, the leadership will punish them by further shutting them out of the process.
The brunt of the lawmaking process is nearly exclusively conducted behind closed doors, meaning voters are usually unaware of what business their elected representatives are truly conducting. If anyone in the general public wants to know what ideas or proposed legislation their city council members, their mayor or even their state governor is writing or sharing with colleagues, they can request and receive those records. But not state lawmakers, who have long exempted themselves from their own public records laws. What’s worse, a recent Ethics Commission opinion says that lawmakers are not bound to the Open Meetings Act, a state law that mandates elected officials conduct public business in public. House Republicans have, for years, unabashedly met behind closed doors to debate and even vote on major legislation that they’re then expected to pass in public a few minutes later. Senate leaders, too, have gotten used to operating in secrecy in recent years, particularly during the conference committee process late in the session when the most important bills are debated by just six lawmakers behind closed doors.
Bills are, indeed, passed into law based on a majority vote (or three-fifths vote for spending bills), but Republicans in both chambers are often expected to vote “yea” even if they don’t know what is in the bills. Typically the biggest, most impactful bills are rushed — stuffed down the throats of rank-and-file lawmakers of both parties who were purposefully kept out of the writing and debating process. In effect, even the majority of Mississippians represented by that Republican majority could not get adequate answers about bills from their representatives if they tried. And if they’re really being honest, many Republican lawmakers would admit after voting bills into law that they didn’t agree with the bill’s premise or wish they would have had more time to better understand the effects.
Don’t just take it from me. Take it from a two-term Republican lawmaker who recently announced his retirement and has decided to get honest with his constituents about what the Mississippi Legislature has become.
In a harrowing Jan. 10 email to his constituents, GOP state Rep. Dana Criswell wholly concedes that the secretive process from House Republican leadership has stripped power from the public. The purpose of Criswell’s email, in fact, is to ask the public to help him and his Republican colleagues read bills because they aren’t given enough time. Seriously. Here’s how his email begins:
A common complaint among legislators is a lack of time to actually read bills. The tactic used by leadership in nearly every legislative body is to overwhelm legislators so they don’t know what is in the bills. This leaves legislators simply following leadership and voting however they are told. One term used in the Mississippi House is “vote bottom right.” If you look at the voting board in the House, you will see “Speaker” at the bottom right. Many legislators simply look at what the Speaker is doing and vote with him.
When faced with over 2,500 bills during the 3 month legislative session, committee chairmen who refuse to provide agendas for bills being considered and a Speaker who regularly suspends the rules and brings up bills for a vote in hours instead of days, legislators are left voting for bills they have never read. Unfortunately, a large majority of legislators just don’t care because they are too busy going to dinner and living the high life off of a lobbyist to spend time reading bills and making informed decisions. But there are a few of us who believe it is our job to be informed and make the best decision possible before casting our vote.
When I first arrived at the Mississippi legislature, I was determined to read bills and know what I was voting for or against. I spent hours every night reading bills that were assigned to my committees only to find out the chairman wasn’t considering any of the bills I had read.
Experience helped me prepare. I learned to eliminate some bills authored by Democrats that were never going to pass and I learned to speed read bills by finding the underlined portions which indicate new language to a code section of law. But none of this solved the problem and completely helped me make informed decisions.
So, I made an agreement with a couple of other legislators to divide the bills among ourselves. We would meet once or twice a week to discuss and inform each other about the bills we had read. While this method helped, we were still behind and found it impossible to read everything we needed to read. I’m pretty sure one of us made a statement similar to, “Reading these bills is a full-time job.”
– GOP Rep. Dana Criswell in a Jan. 10, 2023, email to his constituents.
Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, in his first term as president of the Senate, deserves credit with all this. He sees the broken system clearer than anyone. He inherited a Senate in 2020 that had been ruled for the previous eight years by now-Gov. Tate Reeves, who worked alongside current Speaker of the House Philip Gunn to create this more extreme way of doing things.
Since Hosemann took office, though, he’s implemented several changes to increase transparency like live-streaming committee meetings, halting closed door Senate Republican Caucus meetings that had become commonplace under Reeves’ leadership, and asking Senate committee chairs to publicly post their agendas at least 24 hours in advance. Hosemann has publicly floated reforms to the rushed budgeting process, the absolute epitome of the backwards process laid out above, when no more than six Republican lawmakers decide how to appropriate $7 billion in one single weekend every year.
Despite Hosemann’s best efforts, Senate leaders are still operating in the secretive system that Reeves helped build and are still having to contend with Gunn and his House leaders’ open flaunting of the old civics lesson.
Democrats, of course, have no voice whatsoever in the lawmaking process. For decades now, they’ve decried this system and have filed numerous bills to improve legislative workflow and transparency. But proof positive of their complete lack of influence: In the past 12 legislative sessions, none of those bills have even been considered or debated in Republican-led committees, let alone passed into law.
The losers of this broken system, of course, are everyday Mississippians. Because only a handful of Republican lawmakers have all the power, there’s no space for compromise or productive debate of legislation that affects every single resident for generations to come. Because these leaders operate and thrive in secrecy, Mississippians cannot know the true intentions of the ones in power, and there’s no way of knowing which lobbyists or out-of-state interest groups may have direct influence over what gets passed into law.
And, in turn, Mississippians cannot make truly informed decisions at the polls every four years.
So the brokenness continues. And it continues. And it continues. And it continues.
In the 1980s as a national effort was made to establish a holiday for civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., the Mississippi Legislature struck an unusual compromise as many other states did at the time.
The compromise was to honor King, recognized universally as the leader of the fight to end racial discrimination in Mississippi and in other primarily Southern states, and Confederate General Robert E. Lee on the same day. That holiday will be recognized on Monday.
State Rep. Kabir Karriem, D-Columbus, said he believes it is time that King had the holiday to himself. He has introduced legislation, like he has since coming to the state House in 2016, to remove Lee from the holiday.
“Mississippi needs to move into the future,” said Karriem. “We have changed the state flag (to eliminate the Confederate battle emblem from the design). This is the next logical step.”
Karriem said only Mississippi and Alabama still honor Lee and King on the same day.
In addition, the legislation would eliminate the state holiday of Confederate Memorial Day, which is held on the last Monday in April.
“The bill has never gotten out of committee even though I file it ever year,” said Karriem. “But a lot of the bills filed by Democrats do not get out of committee.”
Karriem said the legislation has multiple co-sponsors, but no white member of the House has signed on as a co-sponsor.
House Education Chairman Richard Bennett discusses education issues before the 2023 Legislature. He wants to expand preschool in Mississippi, and differs with Lt. Gov. Hosemann on incentivizing ‘modified calendars,’ or year-‘round classes for districts.
In this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey welcomes back Dr. Alyssa Killebrew to kick off 2023 and talk about resolutions, being more resilient in the new year and how we can focus on and improve our mental health in 2023.
Dr. Killebrew knows about resiliency. In December 2021, Dr. Killebrew’s longtime husband Keath, a successful farmer, died in a plane crash in South America. This came after the couple had recently lost their unborn child due to COVID-19. You will be inspired by her incredible strength and positive outlook. She talks about her and Keath’s creation of a camp called SEK Intensives to honor their youngest daughter and help both adolescents and their parents deal with life’s challenges.
Dr. Killebrew is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist (No. 54-946), a Licensed Professional Counselor and Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor. In 2005, she earned a Master’s degree of Education (M.Ed.) in Community Counseling from Delta State University. In 2008, she obtained a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Clinical Psychology from Jackson State University and completed a residency at Valley Mental Health in Salt Lake City, Utah. She completed her post-doctoral year with the Mississippi Department of Corrections, where she was the Mental Health Director of the Youthful Offender Unit.
She started her Ridgeland, Mississippi-based private practice, Killebrew Psychological Services, LLC, in 2016, focusing her services primarily on mood disorders, PTSD, addiction and personality disorders. She specializes in Biofeedback, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Prolonged Exposure, and Modified Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).
Whether United States Supreme Court justices take the time to understand how Mississippi’s Constitution is amended could determine if they agree to hear a case asking that a provision prohibiting most people convicted of felonies from voting be found unconstitutional.
The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, like the Supreme Court a conservative-leaning court, appears not to have taken the time to understand the Mississippi Constitution amendment process and thus upheld the racist provision. In fairness to the 5th Circuit judges, they were basing their decision on arguments from the office of Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who also either does not understand the amendment process or wants to ignore the limitations of the process.
Everyone, including Fitch’s office and the judges, agree that the intent of the felony disenfranchisement language, like other sections of the 1890 Constitution, was to prevent African Americans, then a majority in the state, from voting. The narrative of the day from the framers of the Constitution made that clear.
“The plan is to invest permanently the powers of government in the hands of the people who ought to have them: the white people,” James Zachariah George, a U.S. senator who was one of the architects of the 1890 Constitution and to this day has a statue in the U.S. Capitol representing Mississippi, said at the time. There was a belief that Black Mississippians would be more prone to commit certain lesser tier crimes. That is why crimes like bribery, theft and bigamy were deemed to be disenfranchising and murder and rape were not.
Fitch’s office argued and a majority of the 5th Circuit agreed that because the constitutional provision was amended twice – in 1950 and 1968 – to remove burglary and add murder and rape as disenfranchising crimes that the racial taint had been removed and thus the provision is not unconstitutional.
“The critical issue here is not the intent behind Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution, but whether the reenactment of Section 241 (the felony disenfranchisement language) in 1968 was free of intentional racial discrimination,” the nine-member majority of the 17-member court wrote in an unsigned opinion.
The majority concluded it was.
“Mississippi (represented by the office of the Attorney General) has conclusively shown that any taint associated with Section 241 has been cured,” the majority wrote.
The Mississippi Center for Justice and others on behalf of two disenfranchised Mississippians, Roy Harness and Kamal Karriem, are asking the nation’s highest court to reconsider the 5th Circuit ruling. A decision on whether the court will hear the case should be made during the first half of the year.
In asking the court to not hear the case, Fitch is continuing the argument that the racial taint had been removed by what happened in the 1950s and 1960s.
It is important to understand how the Mississippi Constitution is amended. The citizens never got an opportunity to vote on whether they wanted to remove the racist language. The Legislature voted to put on the ballots in the 1950s and 60s language eliminating burglary and adding murder and rape as disenfranchising crimes. No matter how the citizens voted on those amendments, the bulk of the constitutional provision would remain in place. That language imposes a lifetime ban on voting on those convicted of writing a bad check but not for major drug kingpins who do not lose their right to vote even while serving a prison sentence.
And to top it off, it does not take a history scholar to understand that in the 1950s and 60s there were a lot of efforts to discriminate against Black Mississippians being undertaken by the state’s political leaders.
Fitch pointed out that when making its ruling the 5th Circuit said, “Plaintiffs’ proposal that a state constitutional amendment must be voted on word for word to avoid any vestigial racial taint is radically prescriptive…. No subsequent case law supports plaintiffs’ novel, judicially crafted political theory of public consent.”
It would seem, though, that the vote should be on whether to continue an admittingly racist constitutional provision that has never been voted on by Mississippians.
So however the Supreme Court justices decide to handle the case, hopefully they will do so understanding all the circumstances surrounding the racist felony disenfranchisement provision.
As this case is considered, it is important to note Mississippi is one of less than 10 states with a permanent ban on voting.
An investigation is underway into a potential compromise of a shared electronic system among the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department, courts and prosecutors that may have prevented individuals from making bail and returning to their families and jobs.
Sheriff Tyree Jones said two systems connected to the court and the district attorney’s office went down between Jan. 1 and Wednesday evening. Problems were discovered after a power outage when information technology staff noticed the server and system didn’t reboot like they usually do, he said.
“This is something that was totally unpreventable,” Jones said. “There were no signs that this was going to happen. It caught us all by surprise.”
On Friday, Jones said he wasn’t able to share much due to the ongoing investigation. He did not confirm whether the investigation was being conducted by the sheriff’s office. When asked whether hacking may have been involved, he said a cause is still being determined.
Jones said there was never a point when public safety was at risk or people were erroneously released from the jail. He said the system mostly impacted communication between offices and processes that were slowed down.
The sheriff’s office is back on track and catching up from last week, he said.
Charity Bruce, deputy director of consumer protection and public benefits at the Mississippi Center for Justice, said she spoke with a community member who said they tried to pay bail for a family member at the Hinds County jail but couldn’t because the system was down. They also weren’t able to add money to the detainee’s account, she said.
When Bruce called the sheriff’s office and the jail, she asked if there was a way for people to post bond without the electronic system.
Jones doesn’t dispute that detainees weren’t able to make bail and leave the jail while the system was down, but he knows that booking and the ability to electronically share case information, including whether a judge approved bail, were affected.
Generally, when a bail bondsman comes to pay bond for a detainee, jail staff is responsible for confirming the person was granted bond and there is paperwork documenting that, he said.
With the recent system failure, jail staff had to find another way to get that information, such as by calling the courthouse and having someone there locate a detainee’s case file, Jones said.
Harya Tarekegn, director of advocacy and policy at the Mississippi Center for Justice, said the situation raises due process concerns.
Bail is an amount of money set by a judge that a person must pay to get out of jail until their next court appearance. The goal of bail is to make sure defendants show up in court.
Whether bail is awarded and how much depends on several factors, including the alleged crime, whether a person is dangerous, community safety and their risk of fleeing.
Generally, the longer someone is in jail, the worse their outcome is, Tarekegn said. Being in jail often means a person misses work and income, and they aren’t able to see family, she said.
As a result of the Hinds County system going down, she said the Mississippi Center for Justice doesn’t know how many people missed the holidays with family or lost employment because they weren’t able to pay bail and be released.
“All of the implications of not being home are exacerbated by this,” Tarekegn said about detention.
Jones said the past week and a half showed that the sheriff’s office and courts can do some things manually.
Any needed preventative measures would be made by IT, he said. Even though the situation was unexpected, Jones said the sheriff’s office will be prepared if the system were to go offline again.
“This has been a learning experience,” Jones said.
Mississippi’s fledgling Medical Cannabis Program will have a new director starting next week, according to a state Health Department letter obtained by Mississippi Today.
The letter states that the marijuana office’s current attorney, Laura Goodson, will take over as department’s “acting director” starting Tuesday. The cannabis program’s current director, Kris Jones Adcock, has taken on a new department-wide role.
“Ms. Adcock was promoted – due to her excellent qualifications and ability to effectively develop and produce successful program areas within the Agency,” Department of Health spokesperson Liz Sharlot said in a statement. “Ms. Adcock will continue to maintain authority and oversight within the MMCP Program.”
Mississippi Today obtained another letter dated Nov. 29 that announced Adcock assumed a new position on Dec. 1 as the Department of Health’s assistant senior deputy. That position requires her to work alongside Senior Director Jim Craig in the department’s central offices.
That November letter, written by State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney, states Adcock would continue her existing roles – as head of the cannabis program and another department office focused on domestic violence – “during the transition.”
That means for the last five weeks, Adcock has been wearing three hats. Adcock was still working for the domestic violence office when she first took on the medical cannabis program last year.
“Mrs. Goodson brings a wealth of knowledge, legal and management experience to the program,” Adcock writes in her letter announcing the change. “I will continue to work with Mrs. Goodson to ensure continuity in the program.”
The letter also says the office will work quickly to fill the legal position Goodson held.
Goodson will still report to Adcock in her new position, according to the Health Department.
The leadership change comes as Mississippi’s first batches of legal cannabis are nearing entry to the market.
This week, the state gave the first lab – Steep Hill in Flowood – the greenlight to begin testing marijuana flower so it can be approved for sale.
The Health Department’s medical cannabis office has been under some scrutiny since October, when the surge of applications for licenses hit a bottleneck. The office charged with licensing cultivators, workers and labs had only three staffers and no investigators.
The Health Department said at that time it was trying to fill 25 positions for its medical marijuana program and had three more workers scheduled to start by Nov. 1.
