At the time this column is being written, the results of the Mississippi Governor’s election are unknown. As the final days of the campaign wound down, there was a growing consensus that the margin would be small, perhaps even historically small.

When the counting is done Tate Reeves will have won a second term, six in a row for the Republicans, or Brandon Presley will become the first Democratic governor of the state since Ronnie Musgrove, elected 24 years ago.

The 1999 election will be remembered not just as a close battle between Musgrove, who was serving as Lt. Governor at the time of the election, and Republican state representative Michael Parker.

It also represents a real paradox for the Republican Party: the value of an Electoral College system of elections.

Written into the state’s constitution was a provision that the winner of the governor election must not only have a majority of the popular vote (Musgrove finished with 8,342 more votes than Parker) but had to win a majority of the votes from the state’s 122 house districts. By that measure, it was a dead heat, with each candidate in 61 districts.

In the event neither candidate won a majority of popular and district votes, the election was to be determined by the state legislature, a de facto Electoral College. At the time, the Democratic Party held a majority in the House, which gave Musgrove a decided advantage. Putting party loyalty aside, it would have been hard to make the case for Parker, who had received fewer votes overall.

Musgrove won the vote of the House, 86-36 along party lines, to win the governor’s office. Musgrove, serving his days as Lt. Governor, was informed of his win on the floor of the House, just a week before his inauguration.

Since the turn of the century, the Republicans have been elected president without winning the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016).

While three other presidents won the office without winning the popular vote, all of those came in the 19th Century.

By the middle of the 20th Century, the general feeling among both Republicans and Democrats was that the electoral college was an unnecessary relic. After all, there hadn’t been a presidential race decided by the Electoral College since 1888 (Rutherford B. Hayes).

But in two of the last five elections, the president has not secured a majority of support from the majority of the nation’s voters.

Republicans, who have benefitted from the Electoral College, are in favor of keeping it. Democrats, obviously, have a hard time with the idea that the person with fewer votes wins.

That is why what happened in Mississippi in 2020 defies that logic.

Mississippi voters decided the matter for themselves, with 78 percent of voters in the 2020 election choosing to amend the state constitution and discard the electoral college voting system in the House.

Now, a race in which no candidate has a majority of the popular vote will be decided by a runoff.

It’s a paradox, certainly. Mississippi’s Republican voters rejected the electoral college on the state level in 2021, but support it on the national level today. How does that make any sense?

Incidentally if a run-off system had been in place in 1999, it’s not entirely certain that Musgrove would have won, even though he collected 8,000 more votes than Parker. That year, two other candidates were on the ballot. Together they collected 14,213 votes. Who knows if Musgrove’s lead would have held up.

At this writing, I do not know if Tuesday’s election turned out. But I’m pretty sure it won’t create the kind of high drama we witnessed 24 years ago.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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