Brandon Presley, in his bid to unseat Gov. Tate Reeves, has been trying to link the Republican incumbent to Mississippi’s massive welfare scandal.
Since the tens of millions of dollars of fraudulent or questionable spending occurred before Reeves became governor, the accusation of corruption within the Reeves administration has been a hard sell to voters.
Separate from the welfare scandal, though, comes a report this week from Mississippi Today that suggests major donors to Reeves’ political campaigns over the years, including those who have ponied up for his reelection this year, have an unseemly edge when it comes to landing state government contracts over which his administration has control.
The news organization identified 88 individual or corporate donors who have given at least $50,000 to Reeves over the course of his six statewide campaigns. Companies from 15 of these donors have received a total of $1.4 billion in state contracts or grants since he took office as governor in 2020.
A couple of examples:
- Centene, a health care company based in St. Louis, is Reeves’ second-largest campaign donor at $318,000, including a $100,000 contribution this year alone. As a Medicaid managed care provider, it is also the beneficiary of some of the state’s most lucrative contracts, including a current one estimated at around $1.2 billion.
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, Reeves signed emergency orders to award $12.2 million in no-bid contracts to Horne LLP, a large accounting firm based in Ridgeland, to help the state manage a surge in unemployment compensation requests. Neil Forbes, a managing partner at Horne, had never donated to Reeves’ campaigns before then, but since 2021 he has become one of the incumbent’s major individual donors. Forbes and his wife, according to Mississippi Today, have given the governor’s campaign $87,500 in contributions.
Under Mississippi’s weak campaign finance laws, and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that frowns on campaign finance restrictions, all of this is legal. But it does create the appearance that Reeves, a masterful fundraiser, is good to those who are good to him.
Tougher campaign finance laws, assuming they could get past the Supreme Court, tougher purchasing laws, and stricter enforcement of both would curb a lot of this. But it’s unlikely that Reeves is going to champion those kinds of reforms, given how much he has benefited from the current setup.
