The Mississippi Democratic Party is trying to give Brandon Presley a free pass to the party’s nomination.
Its thinking must be that the less energy and money that Presley has to spend securing the nomination, the more he can focus on Gov. Tate Reeves, the Republican incumbent he is trying to unseat.
Both the method and the rationale, however, are specious.
First the method: In disqualifying Presley’s two little-known challengers, the party used the excuse that Bob Hickingbottom and Greg Wash had failed to file their “statement of economic interest” with the state Ethics Commission by the legally prescribed deadline.
Problem is, if that is a legitimate reason to disqualify a candidate, there are dozens of others that should have been disqualified, too. Magnolia Tribune, the online news site, did a quick count and found 56 other Democrats — five for statewide office, 51 for the Legislature — that committed that same allegedly disqualifying omission but whose candidacies were not thrown out.
At least one of the disqualified gubernatorial candidates, Bob Hickingbottom, has notified the state Democratic Party of his intentions to sue if it doesn’t reinstate his candidacy. He also filed last week the belated report with the Ethics Commission.
The Democratic Party would save itself some money and some additional bad publicity if it reinstates Hickingbottom and probably Wash, too. There is no plausible explanation for the disparate treatment these two have received other than as a thinly disguised effort to make Presley’s path to the party’s nomination uncontested.
That might not be such a favor, though.
One of Presley’s biggest obstacles is building up his name identification statewide. He is not well-known outside of the northern third of the state, which he has represented on the Public Service Commission since 2008 A primary contest, even a presumably low-key one, could help spread his name around for relatively little cost.
The Democratic hierarchy might have been influenced by its bad memories of what happened in 2015. That year, the party’s presumptive nominee, Vicki Slater, lost the primary to a truck driver who raised no money, did not campaign and did not even vote in the contest but was first on the ballot and had the advantage of a common name, Robert Gray.
That experience, though, is only relevant in demonstrating how weak a candidate Slater was. If Presley can’t beat two little-financed, unknown challengers in his own party, he has no business in a general election contest with Reeves.
