Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story.
The 1927 New York Yankees, a remarkable team many experts consider the best in baseball history, won 110 games and lost but 44 for a winning percentage of 71.4%. Turns out, it really helps to have Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Bob Meusel batting back-to-back-to-back in the middle of your lineup.
Rick Cleveland
Now, compare that with the current World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, who last season won 93 games and lost 69, a winning percentage of 57.4%. That’s much more normal, or should we say, mortal.
Now then, compare all that to how Mississippi teams have begun their college seasons. Mississippi State has won 11 and lost one, a winning percentage of 91.7%. State’s only defeat, which came Sunday, was to No. 1 ranked UCLA in extra innings. Southern Miss has won 90.9% of its games and 10 straight after losing its opener to the best pitcher in college baseball, Jackson Flora of Cal-Santa Barbara.
State plays USM at Hattiesburg Tuesday night in the nation’s best mid-week matchup, a battle of Top 10 teams. Somebody has to lose. Indeed, a really good team will lose.
And, yes, I know what many readers are thinking, which is: All this winning won’t last. And you are right. Baseball is more a game of failure than success. The best hitters make outs two-thirds of the time. Usually, the best teams lose at least 30% of their games. That’s because even the best hitters go through slumps and even the best pitchers have off days. And sometimes, the other guy just pitches better. Bob Gibson, the most dominant pitcher I ever saw, lost 174 times. That’s right: Gibson lost 41% of his decisions. And he was a first ballot Hall of Famer.
You should know Ole Miss isn’t too far behind its two in-state rivals. The Rebels have won 10 and lost 2, a win percentage of 83.3%. Of course, that rate of winning won’t last, either. It just won’t. The schedule will get lots, lots harder, especially for both the Rebels and the Bulldogs when they get to the SEC season, which happens soon.
That might not be true of Southern Miss, by the way. The computers that calculate college baseball power ratings have spat out numbers that say Southern Miss has played the most difficult schedule in college baseball to date. Indeed, Chris Ostrander’s Golden Eagles currently rank No. 1 in the country in RPI (ratings percentage index).
Neophyte fans might wonder: Just what is this RPI thing you hear announcers talk about and sports writers write about all the time? Simply put, which is not so simple, RPI is a ranking system used by the NCAA to evaluate team performance and strength of schedule, which heavily influences NCAA Tournament selection. It is calculated using three main components: a team’s winning percentage (25%), opponents’ winning percentage (50%) and opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage (25%). The formula factors in where games are played, heavily weighting victories won on the road over those won at home.
See, I told you it wasn’t simple.
A word here about Ostrander, who answers to Oz, as in the wizard of: When USM swept highly regarded Louisiana Tech on Sunday, it marked Ostrander’s 100th victory, just 11 games into only his third season as the Eagles’ head coach. It took Oz only 137 games to win 100. That’s a win percentage of 73%, and that’s outlandish. No USM coach has ever done it faster, which is saying something because the last four Eagles coaches have all been voted in to the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame.
Ostrander will match wits with new State coach Brian O’Connor, a 2024 inductee into the College Baseball Hall of Fame and easily one of the most respected coaches in college baseball. O’Connor won an amazing 917 games in 22 seasons at Virginia. And, in case you are wondering, it took him 145 games to win his first 100, which just goes to show how remarkable Ostrander has been at USM.
Tuesday night’s matchup is a mid-week game, so most of both teams’ best starting pitchers will get a night off. Expect both teams to use multiple arms and expect both coaches to get a look at some of their younger, lesser-used pitchers. That doesn’t mean they won’t be trying to win. A victory would be a nice achievement for either, but a defeat won’t hurt badly, at least RPI-wise, for either team.
Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story.
Defense attorneys for former pro wrestler Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr. tried to discredit the former director of a nonprofit agency who pleaded guilty to sending federal welfare money to DiBiase’s companies and testified she received virtually no services in return.
Over the course of three days, Christi Webb, former director of the now-defunct Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, told a federal jury that she funneled money to DiBiase under pressure from John Davis, the director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services from 2016 to 2019.
Webb testified that she received one item from DiBiase as he drew millions in federal funds: A list of food pantries in north Mississippi.
“Truthfully, I threw it in the garbage can,” she said.
Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr. appears in internal Mississippi Department of Human Services video message to agency workers called “Tuesday Turnaround.” Credit: Mississippi Department of Human Services
Prosecutors allege Davis was instrumental in pushing welfare and food assistance grants to DiBiase, and Webb testified to a variety of tactics Davis used to keep the money flowing.
Webb said Davis called her crying and said, “The only way I can have friends is to give them money.” He ordered her to direct funds to the wrestler, Webb said. Davis even went over her head, she testified, showing up at her Tupelo office while she was not there and demanding Webb’s staff stamp her name on checks to DiBiase for hundreds of thousands of dollars – including on the day her mother died.
Webb testified that when she refused to fund the wrestler’s companies in the fall of 2018, Davis shouted, “I’ll just pull all the money back and fund who I want to fund.”
In 2019, Webb said she got a letter from MDHS that her budget had been cut by half. She finally met with Davis a few months later in his office, and he told her why: “He took his finger on the table, and he said, ‘You drew the line in the sand when you refused to fund Teddy.’’’
Davis rejected this telling when he took the stand before Webb, saying her funding was threatened by budgetary constraints alone.
DiBiase is the only defendant to face a criminal trial in Mississippi’s sprawling welfare scandal, though seven have pleaded guilty. He is being tried on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, theft and money laundering.
The federal government described Webb – who pleaded guilty in 2023 to theft concerning federal funds – as a co-conspirator in the scheme, and U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves called her a “major witness.”
Webb led one of two nonprofits – the other being Mississippi Community Education Center founded by Nancy New – that Davis contracted with to privatize many welfare services across the state. New took the stand after Webb’s testimony concluded Monday.
The defense, which argues DiBiase was a lawful independent contractor of the nonprofits, sought to discredit Webb by reminding her of moments she said she couldn’t recall or claimed didn’t happen.
On Friday, DiBiase’s attorneys introduced a text thread of a group chat including Davis and Webb on June 26, 2018, the day Webb’s mother died. Webb had testified that her phone was off and she only found out Davis and DiBiase had visited her offices to obtain a $350,000 check when her financial officer called later that day.
But the texts showed Webb responding to Davis’s message that the pair planned to drop by the office. She wrote she had told her financial officer to prepare a check.
“This is not what you said this morning,” defense attorney Sidney Lampton said.
“I had forgotten all of that,” Webb responded.
In a particularly tense moment, Lampton sought to play a recording she claimed Webb had made of a phone call with Davis, in which Davis was explaining her funding had to be cut because of a federal government shutdown in early 2019. Webb had said she did not record such a call.
The prosecution objected several times. Reeves asked the defense how the recording undermined the government’s theory of the case.
“Your honor, it’s impeachment,” Lampton said. “She says, ‘I don’t remember ever turning this over to the government.’ It was filmed in her home.”
The recording was also important, Lampton continued to argue, because it proved Davis stopped funding Webb not because of DiBiase, but “because of a federal government shutdown, and there was no money.”
“There’s a whole lot of reasons in this record as to why people did get money and didn’t get money,” Reeves said, rejecting the argument. “So I guess we’re going to impeach on top of impeach on top of impeach.”
Former Mississippi Department of Human Services director John Davis heads to the Thad Cochran United States Courthouse, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026 in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
With the aid of several checks she cut to DiBiase, the prosecution walked Webb through a series of events that culminated in Davis cutting her funding in retaliation, she testified.
In early 2018, the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services experienced a budget shortfall that MDHS helped plug by shuffling funds from nonprofits run by Webb and New. The agency pulled $6.5 million from FRC’s budget, Webb testified, leading to across-the-board cuts — for seemingly everyone but DiBiase.
A few days after Webb sent DiBiase a letter that his grant would be cut, she testified she got a call. It was Davis, who said she couldn’t stop funding DiBiase.
“We’re all taking a salary cut and he’s not doing anything, so we see this as $20,000 a month that we could use to provide our services with,” Webb said she responded.
Then, Davis started crying — a move the director had pulled before, she said, when he was depressed in the middle of the night.
“He said the only way I can have friends is to give them money and I’ve got to keep Teddy and he’s got to keep this grant,” Webb said. “He said that’s the only way I ever get friends and I said, John, remember you have friends, everybody thinks the world of you. The governor, his wife, they love you. Why do you think that? He said, the only way I can have friends is to give them money, and I’ve just got to give Teddy money. You cannot cut his grant. And he cried some more and I listened.”
The next contract that Webb inked with DiBiase came with $500,000 upfront, again for the services of leadership outreach coordinator. Webb said by this point, she knew she wouldn’t receive any work in return.
“The contract was real, but it was like a scam,” she said.
Not long after, Webb testified that MDHS assigned her a nearly $500,000 grant from a federal program for emergency food assistance. She wrote a budget itemizing her plans to hire four employees and buy food supplies.
When MDHS sent her the budget back, it came with a significant change. All the funds would be assigned to a category labeled “subsidies, loans and grants.” Two days later, Webb said Davis called and said DiBiase was going to be the grant administrator. All the funds would go to him.
She said she resolved not to send any more money to DiBiase. But in August 2018, the wrestler and Davis came to visit Tupelo as Webb was away from the office, preparing for a fundraiser.
The prosecution introduced a note that Webb said she wrote to herself that day: “John Davis + Teddy D came to Tupelo for the Gerald Crabb concert. He went to Debbie Underwood’s office + demanded a check for Teddy. He would (underlined twice) not (underlined once) let her call me.”
When Webb joined FRC in 2006, she said the nonprofit had three full-time employees and couldn’t afford to pay their health insurance.
After Davis took the helm at MDHS, FRC’s budget grew by millions, Webb testified. By 2017, she said the nonprofit had over 300 employees and 23 centers, from Madison County in the Jackson metro area to Tishomingo County on the Tennessee state line, providing programs free beds for needy children, English classes for Spanish speakers, and parenting classes.
FRC also started monitoring grant compliance by creating a 14-person review board. But the panel never looked at DiBiase’s contracts, she testified.
The year after Davis took over the agency, Webb testified that he told her to enter into a contract with DiBiase’s company, Priceless Ventures, for “services as a leadership training coordinator.” At the time, Webb – not a wrestling fan – said she didn’t know who DiBiase was, and she didn’t think the nonprofit needed this service, having a former community college president, a former superintendent and a former principal in its employ.
The contract came with a cash advance of $250,000, as well as an option to extend the contract for another four years, for more than $1 million.
“I see you kind of closing your eyes,” said Dave Fulcher, an assistant U.S. attorney, after he asked Webb to recall the contract specifics.
“It just makes me sick to even look at it,” she said. “It’s just bad. I just did the wrong thing.”
Webb said DiBiase did not do any of the work under the contract. After he exercised the option to extend it, she testified that she delayed his $20,833.33 payment by one month in a failed attempt to find a way out of paying him.
The prosecution alleged that Davis shared this view – at least for a moment. Fulcher introduced an October 2017 text from Davis to Webb and New.
“I get like this when I get away from the office. I have clarity of thought and you guys are problem saying what the hell is talking about,” the director wrote, with some words missing. “It just bothers me that I allowed these guys to gain access and it feels like they are using. It you dont mind tell Ted Jr. to report to my office Friday morning. We are going to engage his ass.”
Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story.
Cassandra Welchlin, executive director of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable, says Mississippi still ranks at or near the worst in pay inequality for women compared to white men. That gap is even worse for Black women in the workforce. Mississippi’s male-dominated Legislature has been loath to address the disparity in any meaningful way.
Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story.
Sports gambling giant DraftKings and energy company Entergy spent a combined $107,398 on a 2025 Super Bowl weekend for House Speaker Jason White, House Public Utilities Chairman Brent Powell, White’s staff and a couple of their spouses.
The companies, which stand to make millions from state government actions for which they are lobbying, spent more than White’s annual salary of $85,000 wining and dining the speaker, Powell and staff on a one-weekend Super Bowl trip to New Orleans. The trip was first reported in a 2025 Mississippi Today article. The special interest spending was only recently made public in official lobbying reports because of Mississippi’s weak lobbying laws and reporting requirements.
State lobbying laws give the clients of lobbyists, in this case DraftKings and Entergy, until the end of a year to document gifts to public officials. Even though White’s Super Bowl trip took place in February of 2025, it only appeared in state documents nearly a year later, after lobbying reports were due on Jan. 30. And when it did appear, the initial report DraftKings filed documenting the expense was inaccurate and was later updated.
The Mississippi House has passed legislation to legalize mobile sports betting for three years in a row, first passing it the year before White became Speaker. But the measures have died in the Senate. In 2025, days after House lawmakers voted to legalize online betting for the second time, the speaker’s staffers were enjoying the hospitality of DraftKings at its Super Bowl weekend festivities.
Entergy spent a total of $47,398 on tickets, dinner and lodging for White, his wife, Rep. Powell and Powell’s wife. As chairman of the House Public Utilities Committee, Powell has some oversight of Entergy, the state’s largest energy company.
Powell declined to comment on the trip.
In 2025, Entergy spent over $300,000 lobbying the Legislature to advance its interests. Such efforts can reap significant rewards, though lawmakers have said such lobbying doesn’t influence their policy decisions.
For example, in 2024, the Legislature granted Entergy the authority to build power-generating facilities without obtaining the normally required approval from the Public Service Commission. The deal is part of a $10-billion state agreement with Amazon Web Services. This session, the House has passed a bill requested by Entergy for the state to loan the company $200 million to cover damages from Winter Storm Fern.
In a statement, Leyla Goodsell, an Entergy spokesperson, said the company had access to a limited number of Super Bowl game tickets, some of which were assigned to a suite specifically for its guests.
“Entergy Mississippi, an operating company of Entergy Corporation, invited Speaker White and Representative Powell and their spouses to attend the event as our guests,” Goodsell said. “As always, Entergy will comply with all federal, state and local regulations.”
DraftKings, one of the nation’s highest-grossing gaming companies, has invested heavily in lobbying for legal online betting in Mississippi and other states. It spent $60,000 on box seat tickets for three members of White’s staff and one of their spouses, who documented the trip on social media. Mississippi Today found that the social media posts were later edited to remove any mention of DraftKings after the news outlet began asking questions about the trip.
DraftKings initially filed a lobbying report on Jan. 29 that showed a $60,000 expense for Super Bowl tickets for Jason White. But the company changed the report to say it bought tickets for White’s staff, not the speaker himself. Mississippi law says lobbyists must document gifts for all public employees, not just the officials these employees work for.
On Feb. 6, DraftKings filed a corrected report removing Speaker White’s name and inserting four expenditures worth $15,000 each for three members of the speaker’s staff and one of their spouses.
White didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on the trip when Mississippi Today published its initial story revealing the trip in 2025. When reached for comment in February on the lobbying reports, White told Mississippi Today his Super Bowl trip was never about sports betting.
“I went to meet with the board of directors from Entergy, which obviously is our largest utility provider in the state,” White said. “It’s where their home corporate office is, it’s where their entire board was. They were a major corporate sponsor of the Super Bowl. I never thought twice about being their guest. I enjoyed my time with them. I also enjoyed meeting other elected officials who were there as well during my time meeting with the Entergy folks.”
When asked why his staff attended the game on DraftKings’ dime, White said it was the result of an invitation that he passed along.
“They actually went as a last-minute invite because DraftKings had a box that had open seats and they called and invited me, and I said, ‘No, I’m already attending with Entergy,’ and they offered that to my staff and some other staff in the building who went.’ For me, it was much ado about nothing. We passed mobile sports for multiple years, the trip was never about discussing legislation related to mobile sports,” White said. “It was nothing out of the ordinary for us. I know y’all have made lots of hay about it, but it didn’t change any perspectives for us, nor for the average Mississippian who is for mobile sports betting.”
Critics of Mississippi’s lobbying laws argue the practice of lavishing public officials with expensive gifts fosters distrust. One such critic is John Reeves, an attorney and former longtime Republican state representative. Reeves helped pass reform of Mississippi’s lobbying laws in the 1990s, including a ban on lobbyists paying for lawmakers’ rent. He said the price tag for the Super Bowl weekend exceeded much of what he witnessed while trying to rein in trips and high-dollar gifts for lawmakers.
“That’s just absolutely off the charts. I hate to be criticizing people. I don’t like to do that,” Reeves said. “But my goodness, how can you explain getting a $15,000 ticket to the Super Bowl, and how that has anything to do with your public service? You can’t. And all that’s going to do is erode the public’s trust in government.”
The Republican speaker, one of the most powerful politicians in the state, has repeatedly said that legalizing mobile sports betting is one of his top priorities. Proponents such as White say legalization would be a financial boon to the state. It would also further enrich the gambling companies that facilitate online betting.
Estimates vary, but many say the state is missing out on between $30 million and $80 million a year in taxes as a black market for online betting continues to thrive. While specific revenue figures for DraftKings aren’t publicly projected, as one of the nation’s most dominant companies in the industry, it would likely compete for a significant share of Mississippi’s market.
The Boston-based sports gambling giant has been at the forefront of a years-long lobbying push to legalize online betting in Mississippi and around the country. In a statement, Stephen Miraglia, a DraftKings spokesperson, did not answer questions about what the company hoped to achieve by paying for these tickets or why it had to correct its initial lobbying report.
“On occasion, DraftKings hosts elected officials from around the country at live sporting events and is careful to ensure compliance with all state and federal lobbying disclosure requirements,” Miraglia said.
Around 40 states have some form of legalized sports betting, and over 20 have full online betting with multiple operators, according to Action Network, a sports betting application and news site. Some states have only in-person betting, and some only have a single online operator in the state. Mississippi allows sports betting now, but only inside casinos.
Mississippi has been one of the holdouts on online betting, in part due to fears that legalization could cut into the profits of brick-and-mortar casinos and increase the prevalence of gambling addiction, which some experts say is a growing problem. Influential religious institutions in the Bible Belt state have also opposed the spread of gambling.
On Feb. 8, the day before the 2025 Super Bowl, White reminded his social media followers that Mississippi had attempted to legalize mobile sports betting for three years.
This year, his chamber voted again to legalize online betting, this time tying the policy to a proposal to shore up financial support for the state’s struggling public employees’ pension system. It is unclear whether the proposal has the support to advance in the Senate.
That hasn’t stopped lobbyists from sports gambling companies, including DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesar’s, from spending money throughout the year on trips to sporting events and dinners out on the town for Mississippi politicians.
The state’s lobbying laws allow for a distinction between individual lobbyists and clients, leaving open to interpretation what lobbyists and their clients are required to report and when they’re required to report their expenses.
Reeves left the Legislature in 2008 and said public reporting regulations for lobbyists remain lax compared to other states, a status quo that sows public distrust. He believes the Legislature should pass new regulations requiring the clients of lobbyists to report the gifts they purchase for lawmakers within 30 days. He also thinks lawmakers should raise their own salaries to disincentivize them from accepting gifts from lobbyists.
“In a perfect world, they would set the salary of the Legislature at a rate that would encourage people to run for it and not expect freebies, like some states do. Because when you accept a trip like that, whether it’s benign or not, you couldn’t convince one person in the public that it doesn’t influence the vote of those members,” Reeves said. “It’s the appearance of impropriety.”
John Pelissero, professor emeritus of political science and a government ethics scholar at Loyola University Chicago, told Mississippi Today that delays in disclosing lobbying or campaign finance information create an “absence of transparency.”
DraftKings and Entergy filed their required lobbying reports on time. But because current state law requires only an annual filing, the public cannot see how major industries lobby lawmakers until long after the regular legislative session is over.
“If you find out about this a year after the Super Bowl, it loses its significance because it’s so long after the event took place,” Pelissero said.
He added that several states are pushing for more frequent reporting requirements for elected officials and lobbyists to provide the public with timelier information.
“What more frequent sharing of information does is serve the public interest by providing more information,” Pelissero said.
Editor’s note: Warwick Sabin, the CEO of Deep South Today, parent company of Mississippi Today, attended an Entergy-sponsored reception in New Orleans the morning before the Super Bowl in 2025. The event was not at the Superdome. He did not have any editorial involvement in this article or Mississippi Today’s previous articles about Mississippi lawmakers, legislative staffers and some spouses receiving an expenses-paid trip to the 2025 Super Bowl.
Introducing, Mississippi Explained: our weekly news quiz to test your knowledge of this week’s news 🧠
Tuesday is the deadline for committees to pass general bills from the other chamber. However, some lawmakers, including Rep. Rob Roberson and Sen. Lydia Chassaniol, have said it’s unlikely they’ll call another committee meeting ahead of the deadline. The move will likely kill school choice and prison health care reform.
Quiz question: Who decides which bills are brought up for a vote in committee?
Email your answer to newsletter@mississippitoday.org with your first name and last initial, and we’ll shout you out in the next quiz post on Monday, March 9.
The audio version of this story is AI generated and is not human reviewed. It may contain errors or inaccuracies.
Two men have pleaded guilty in federal court to fraudulently receiving COVID-19 unemployment benefits while they were incarcerated in Mississippi.
Kev’Veonta Short and Travis Thorn were convicted last week in separate cases in the Southern District of Mississippi of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They are expected to be sentenced in the coming months. The charge carries a maximum 20-year sentence and a $250,000 fine.
The unemployment insurance benefits were federally subsidized through the CARES Act during the pandemic. Incarcerated people were not eligible to receive the money.
Short, 32, of Natchez, pleaded guilty Friday to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for submitting false unemployment insurance claims while imprisoned at the South Mississippi Correctional Institution. Short is scheduled for sentencing in July.
Between May and July 2020, Short submitted an application through the Mississippi Department of Employment Security, according to court records.
Within a span of two weeks that May, a dozen incarcerated peoplein the state, including Short, submitted unemployment benefit applications, the indictment states.
After receiving the money, Short and other members of the conspiracytransferred it to other prisoners using “Green Dot” reloadable debit cards, Way2Go Cards and CashApp, according to court records.
In 2020, Short was serving time for cocaine possession and aggravated assault, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections. He was discharged in 2022.
He was ordered held in federal custody pending trial in September 2025 for a number of reasons, including prior criminal history for violent offenses and failure to appear at past municipal court appearances, according to court records.
Short’s two accomplices in the COVID fraud scheme, Adrian Wilson and Aaron Sanders, pleaded guilty to the same charge in February. Both men are still incarcerated and state prison records list their unit as “Federal court order.” Wilson is set to be sentenced in June.
Another co-defendant, Vicki Page, is set to go to trial in April. She is accused of receiving over $7,000 of fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits and transferring them to Sanders through CashApp, according to court records.
On Wednesday, Thorn, 45, of Monroe, Louisiana, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for working with others to fraudulently obtain about $13,500 in unemployment benefits while he was in a Mississippi prison. He is expected to be sentenced in July.
Between May and September 2020, he worked with an unnamed, unindicted co-conspirator and others in Harrison County to fill out an application for benefits for him with the Mississippi Department of Employment Security, according to court records. Thorn gave his personal information to another person to apply for the benefits, and the co-conspirator provided her address in Gulfport as the residence on Thorn’s application.
Through a debit card, he received about $3,400 in state unemployment benefits and about $10,200 in federal unemployment compensation, according to the indictment. Then the co-conspirator used some of the benefit money to make purchases and transferred some of it to Thorn through his commissary fund.
In 2020, Thorn was serving time for burglary and aggravated assault, according to MDOC. He was released on probation in March 2025 and was being supervised by federal officials in Louisiana.
The FBI and Mississippi State Auditor’s Office investigated the case involving Short and the other SMCI prisoners. The auditor’s office, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Office of the Inspector General handled the investigation of Thorn.
Auditor Shad White launched Operation Payback in May 2024 to investigate unemployment compensationduring the pandemic. It has resulted in another state prisoner’s conviction for fraud.
“We will continue to find as many of these fraudsters as possible and hold them accountable for their crimes,” White said in a February statement announcing a 15-year sentence and restitution for Kenjarell Thomas, who received benefits while incarcerated.
The audio version of this story is AI generated and is not human reviewed. It may contain errors or inaccuracies.
Secretary of State Michael Watson on Monday announced he will not run for reelection in 2027, further fueling the speculation that he will run for lieutenant governor next year.
Watson, a Republican, said at the Stennis Institute’s Capitol Press Forum that while he won’t run for secretary of state again, he will “still be on the ballot” next year.
“We have really gotten to the point where we feel like we’ve done our duty,” Watson said. We’ve done our work at the secretary of state’s office. I can walk out of there feeling like I’ve left the place better than I found it.”
Watson, 48, represented Jackson County in the state Senate for three terms. He later won a bid in 2019 to become secretary of state and was easily reelected to a second term in 2023.
Since serving as secretary of state, Watson has championed measures to ensure only U.S. citizens vote in Mississippi elections, to strengthen the state’s campaign finance laws and to repeal onerous “red tape” regulations on businesses.
Watson is the second statewide official to reveal at least part of his future political plans, though Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Gov. Tate Reeves are prevented from running for another term in their current offices because of term limits. State Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson has announced he is running for governor next year.
The lieutenant governor has enormous sway over the legislative process and is the presiding officer of the Senate. The chamber’s rules allow the lieutenant governor to appoint people to lead legislative committees and refer bills to specific committees.
The audio version of this story is AI generated and is not human reviewed. It may contain errors or inaccuracies.
A state senator says she is unlikely to advance bills aimed at improving medical care in Mississippi prisons and redirecting control of the state prison health care contract.
Corrections Committee Vice Chairwoman Lydia Chassaniol, a Republican from Winona, called a committee meeting on Thursday and advanced only two House bills. She told Mississippi Today that she was unlikely to call another meeting ahead of Tuesday’s deadline for committees to pass general bills from the other chamber.
Chassaniol is running the committee while Corrections Chairman Juan Barnett, a Democrat from Heidelberg, is out with an illness. She said Barnett only requested two bills be passed, and that she planned to honor his wishes even if it meant the House proposals, which passed that chamber 120-0, would die.
“Well, too bad. Too bad. I mean, I was trying to, it’s very important to me to show respect for our chairman, and that’s what he asked us to bring forward, so I’m basically a stand-in for Chairman Barnett, who was unable to be here today because he’s ill,” Chassaniol said.
The proposals Chassaniol is poised to let die include a bill to require the creation of a hepatitis C program and an HIV program aimed at improving the treatment to prisoners. An Mississippi Today report in October revealed that only a fraction of Mississippi prisoners diagnosed with hepatitis C receive treatment, which has allowed the treatable infection to develop into a life-threatening illness. Additionally, the bill would require the state to develop a plan focused on improving the health of female prisoners.
Another bill Chassaniol declined to take up would take the power to award health contracts away from the Department of Corrections and task the Department of Finance and Administration with soliciting proposals for a new medical contractor. The current medical contractor, Kansas-based VitalCore Health Strategies, was awarded over $315 million in emergency, no-bid state contracts by the Department of Corrections from 2020 to 2024. It has since faced legal challenges and allegations that it routinely denies or provides inadequate care inside Mississippi’s prisons.
Those bills, which follow an ongoing investigative series from Mississippi Today on the alleged denial of care in state prisons, are part of a reform package spearheaded by Rep. Becky Currie, the Republican House Corrections chairwoman from Brookhaven.
Chassaniol did advance a bill authored by Rep. Justis Gibbs, a Democrat from Jackson, that would require MDOC to develop policies for supplying protective equipment when incarcerated people use strong cleaning chemicals. Gibbs introduced the legislation, which also passed the House last year but died in the Senate, in response to the case of Susan Balfour, a woman who developed terminal breast cancer after she came into contact with raw industrial chemicals during cleaning duty. Balfour died in August.
The other measure passed by the Senate panel on Thursday would create more oversight of prison deaths. The bill would direct and empower the Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force to look into “unexpected” deaths using information provided by coroners’ reports and MDOC.
Prison understaffing and gang violence likely led to the killings of nearly 50 people since 2015, according to an investigation by Mississippi Today, The Marshall-Project Jackson, the Clarion Ledger, the Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link.
Both of the prison health measures that haven’t advanced were double-referred, which means they would need to pass out of an additional committee on top of the Corrections Committee. When a bill is double-referred, it’s sometimes a sign that it lacks the support of the chamber’s leadership.
A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann did not respond to a request about whether Hosemann supports the prison reform measures or whether he would urge Chassaniol to call another meeting to pass more bills ahead of Tuesday’s deadline.
Chassaniol said she would only call another meeting at Barnett’s request.
“I have been directed by Chairman (Juan) Barnett, whose wishes I’m trying to comply with.”
We are proud to announce that Anna Wolfe, an editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for Mississippi Today, will join the staff of the newly formed Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center, created in collaboration with The New York Times and Big Local News.
Wolfe joins as an investigative reporter covering Mississippi, beginning March 16. She will remain based in the Mississippi Today newsroom, and her work will be published in Mississippi Today and The Times.
Anna Wolfe
Deep South Today, the nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News in New Orleans and The Current in Lafayette, Louisiana, launched the investigative center in January. The center will employ reporters in Louisiana and Mississippi and produce investigative stories on topics and institutions critical to local communities in each state.
The center will operate in collaboration with editors at the Local Investigations Fellowship program at The Times, including Dean Baquet, former executive editor of The Times, who now leads the fellowship program.
Wolfe joined Mississippi Today’s newsroom in 2018 to report on poverty and immediately began spotlighting the state’s failures to serve its most vulnerable residents. Her 2020 joint reporting on Mississippi’s restitution centers, Prisoners for Hire, exposed modern-day debtors prisons and received multiple national awards. Her yearslong investigation into the state’s spending of federal welfare funds led to a 2022 series called The Backchannel, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting and earned her a Livingston Award.
In 2023, Wolfe became the youngest solo winner of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, one of the nation’s top journalism honors, and only the third two-time winner of the award. In 2024, she was named in TIME100 Next, which recognizes emerging leaders driving change. In 2025, four women who were imprisoned on lengthy sentences for offenses related to their pregnancies were released from prison shortly after Wolfe wrote about the hazy legal theory that landed them there.
A native of Washington State and a 2014 Mississippi State University graduate, Wolfe has spent her entire journalism career in Jackson. Last year, she led the launch of Mississippi Today’s Jackson desk dedicated to telling accountability-focused stories about life in the capital city.
“Anna Wolfe has fundamentally changed Mississippi with her relentless, dogged investigative reporting,” said Adam Ganucheau, Deep South Today’s executive editor and chief content officer. “Her work hasn’t just surfaced problems. It’s also forced accountability at the highest levels and given Mississippians the clear, documented truth they couldn’t get otherwise. In an era of diminished watchdog reporting, particularly in Mississippi, Anna’s commitment to going deeper, staying longer and following the facts wherever they lead has proved exactly why investigative journalism still matters. Every Mississippian is better informed because of her, and we’re so lucky to have her fighting for all of us in this new role.”
“We are thrilled to welcome Anna as the first hire of the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center,” said Chris Davis, deputy editor for the Local Investigations Fellowship. “Our mission is strengthened by her expertise, and readers across Mississippi will be better informed because of her relentless reporting. Her arrival marks the first step in our commitment to building a world-class investigative team in this region.”
By working with The Times to launch and build out a new Investigative Reporting Center, Deep South Today will position an upstart investigative team alongside some of the most prominent editors in the journalism industry. This initiative builds on the success that Mississippi Today already established with The Times and Big Local News. A joint investigation by those organizations about corruption and abuse by Mississippi sheriffs was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting and led to expanded federal investigations and legislative reforms in the state. The Local Investigations Fellowship won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 2025 in collaboration with the Baltimore Banner and Big Local News for an investigation into the deadly opioid crisis.
ABOUT DEEP SOUTH TODAY
Deep South Today is a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News and The Current.
Founded in 2016, Mississippi Today is now the largest newsroom in the state, and in 2023 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Verite News launched in 2022 in New Orleans, where it covers inequities facing communities of color. The Current is a nonprofit news organization founded in 2018 serving Lafayette and southern Louisiana.
With its regional scale and scope, Deep South Today is rebuilding and re-energizing local journalism in communities where it had previously eroded, and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.
ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES
The New York Times Company is a trusted source of quality, independent journalism whose mission is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. With more than 12 million subscribers across a diverse array of print and digital products — from news to cooking to games to sports — The Times is a diversified media company with curious readers, listeners and viewers around the globe.
ABOUT BIG LOCAL NEWS
Launched in 2020 as a program of Stanford University’s Journalism and Democracy Initiative, Big Local News helps reporters better use data in service of accountability journalism. Big Local News shares data and reporting recipes for journalists to localize stories at biglocalnews.org. It also provides news detection tools that monitor a wide variety of data and information streams. The goal: Make it easier for journalists to find the stories that matter at the local level.
Big Local News regularly supports and mentors journalists in computational methods, including The New York Times’s Investigative Reporting Fellows, and was integrally involved with a collaborative project with The Times and The Baltimore Banner, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting earlier this year.
