Hyde-Smith’s victory, reported by The Associated Press, came in the final Senate race of the midterm elections and will increase the Republican majority in the chamber to 53-47 once the new Congress is sworn in, a net pickup of two seats.

Teetering after several rhetorical gaffes drew a harsh spotlight to her campaign, Hyde-Smith received a last-minute boost from President Donald Trump, who appeared at two rallies with her Monday and cautioned Mississippians that a victory for Espy would also be one for Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

The Republican win came as a deep relief to the party and Trump in a state where they typically never have problems in Senate races. Trump boasted repeatedly this year about his influence in helping his preferred candidates win elections, but the party had to go to unusual lengths — with the rallies, multiple tweets by the president, a vast financial investment and dozens of Republican election workers dispatched to the state — to help Hyde-Smith over the finish line.

Her victory is clearly good news for Senate Republicans, who will now have an expanded, conservative majority to help advance Trump’s judicial nominees and negotiate with a Democratic-led House.

With 95 percent of the precincts reporting, Hyde-Smith had just more than 54 percent of the votes.

“The reason we won is because Mississippians know me and they know my heart,” she said Tuesday night. “This win tonight, this victory, it’s about our conservative values, it’s about the things that mean the most to all of us Mississippians: our faith, our family.”

Espy was the third prominent black Democrat to go down to defeat in a statewide race in the South this year, following losses by two gubernatorial candidates, Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida.

Addressing supporters at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum here less than three hours after the polls closed, Espy said he had already conceded to Hyde-Smith. “She has my prayers as she goes to Washington to unite a very divided Mississippi,” he said.

Hyde-Smith’s election reinforced Republicans’ grip on power in Mississippi, a state they have come to dominate since the early 2000s, and showed that the political realignments taking shape in parts of the South are still in a nascent stage in Mississippi.

Still, the fact that Hyde-Smith faced a challenging runoff election, after no candidate received a majority of the vote Nov. 6, suggested that Democrats could make select races competitive once again. And the determined efforts to salvage her seat signaled that rhetoric seemingly steeped in Mississippi’s racist past risks a modern political price.

Although Hyde-Smith was never on a glide path to power — she faced a Republican rival and Espy in the first round of voting, all but guaranteeing Tuesday’s runoff vote — her campaign became more seriously imperiled through her own statements, including one in which she said that if a supporter invited her to “a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”

Without that comment, and a handful of other controversial remarks, Democrats and Republicans alike said, Hyde-Smith’s victory Tuesday would have been a near-lock.

Instead, Espy, 64, and his allies were able to seize on Hyde-Smith’s rhetoric and argue that it was an anachronistic representation of Mississippi, a state that has struggled mightily to repair its image more than a half-century after some of the gravest abuses of the civil rights era.

During a debate last week, Hyde-Smith, 59, who was the state agriculture commissioner until this year, said her “public hanging” remark reflected “no ill will,” and she asserted that she was being unfairly vilified.

Espy, a former agriculture secretary in the Clinton administration who was Mississippi’s first black member of Congress since Reconstruction, replied: “It came out of your mouth. I don’t know what’s in your heart, but we all know what came out of your mouth.”

Still, Espy refrained from attacking his opponent too strongly over her remarks, mindful of the large bloc of conservative white voters in the state who support Republicans and are deeply loyal to Trump. It was a reflection of the balance Democrats need to strike as they try to make inroads in Southern states like Georgia and Texas, where appeals to the base of African-Americans, Hispanics and moderate suburbanites could alienate rural whites.

In region after region Tuesday, Hyde-Smith was at her strongest in Mississippi’s rural and predominantly white counties, outpacing past Republican luminaries like Mitt Romney, the party’s presidential nominee in 2012. But in areas with greater numbers of college-educated white voters, such as the Memphis suburbs, she did less well, allowing Espy to draw closer than Democrats ordinarily do.

Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the seat in April when Thad Cochran retired for health reasons, will now fill the remaining two years of his term. The seat will again be on the ballot in 2020, when a six-year term will be at stake.

Mississippi is hardly accustomed to bruising Senate races between Democrats and Republicans. Sen. Roger Wicker, who was also on the ballot Nov. 6, won his bid for re-election this month with about 59 percent of the vote. (In 2014, Cochran survived a primary challenge and then trounced his Democratic rival in the general election.)

But in the three weeks between the first round of voting and the second, the matchup between Espy and Hyde-Smith became a nationally scrutinized test of Mississippi’s racial tolerance and the state’s standing as a conservative bulwark.

Although Espy announced his campaign months ago, it was not until the election’s closing weeks that he began to draw substantial national attention. But in Mississippi, speculation about Hyde-Smith’s strength as a candidate had swirled since March, when Gov. Phil Bryant named her as Cochran’s replacement, rejecting recommendations that he appoint himself.

Another Republican, Chris McDaniel, joined the contest, running only four years after he nearly defeated Cochran. Some Republican officials and strategists, including a few of the Legislature’s most influential members, publicly and privately questioned whether Hyde-Smith would be able to endure a well-financed campaign against her. Even the White House did not initially embrace Hyde-Smith, who they worried would falter in the race against McDaniel.

But Trump, betting on his enormous personal popularity in Mississippi, ultimately endorsed Hyde-Smith, who toured the state in a bus emblazoned with a picture of her and the president.

Speaking to reporters in Southern Mississippi on Monday, Trump tried to play down the “public hanging” remark that created so much of the firestorm that engulfed Hyde-Smith’s campaign.

“Really it was something that was sad and it was a little flip,” the president said after a round table on criminal justice legislation in Gulfport. “She called me, she said, ‘I said something that I meant exactly very different,’ and I heard an apology loud and clear.”

Democratic and Republican officials believed that Trump’s visit would stir up supporters of both candidates, edging up Tuesday’s turnout after a first round of voting in which Espy won 40.6 percent, and Hyde-Smith took 41.5 percent.

At a glance, the memory and mathematics of Mississippi politics appeared to favor Hyde-Smith in a runoff: Republicans had won Senate races uninterrupted since the 1980s, and the party has won the past four campaigns for the Greek Revival governor’s mansion on East Capitol Street in Jackson.

And in Mississippi, which has the nation’s highest proportion of black residents but where about 60 percent of the voting-age population is white, political lines are often drawn in parallel to racial ones.

Espy needed a substantial turnout among black Mississippians, who made up more than a third of the voting-age population and historically sided with Democratic candidates. But Democrats also recognized that Espy needed to win about a quarter of the white vote; to that end, some of his advertisements evoked Mississippi’s long-running frustration with how it is regarded across the country.

But few people believed that Mississippi had many undecided voters in the campaign’s final days. The closing pitches from the candidates showcased the dueling approaches to the race.

At a church in Jackson on Monday night, Espy mixed outreach to black voters with a message he hoped would appeal to disaffected centrists, eschewing sharp partisan oratory while urging supporters to spend Tuesday “marching to the polls like it’s a holiday.”

And in Tupelo, with Trump at her side, Hyde-Smith eagerly wagered once more that an appeal to the right was the surest path toward political survival in Mississippi.

“I will stand for your conservative values,” she said, “and that’s what’s on the ballot.”

The New York Times

Alan Blinder © 2018 The New York Times