Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won the Senate runoff in Mississippi by a margin of 54-to-46 percent, according to the Associated Press, overcoming a series of missteps that brought the state’s dark history of racism and violence to the forefront.
Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the Senate earlier this year after Republican Thad Cochran stepped down because of health reasons, defeated former congressman and agriculture secretary Mike Espy. Neither candidate had won the requisite 50 percent in the first round of the special election on Election Day. She is the first woman elected to the Senate from Mississippi.
Hyde-Smith was the favorite in the solidly red state, and the final Senate election of 2018 was long seen as an afterthought. But when video surfaced earlier this month of the senator telling a supporter, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row,” the state’s racial wounds were reopened.
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