Tate Reeves is the Republican nominee for governor.
Despite the noise on social media and other platforms, and despite the fact that his worthy opponent Bill Waller Jr. made a fight of it, the lieutenant governor will go head-to-head with Attorney General and Democratic nominee for governor Jim Hood in November.
Mississippi’s voters had an abundance of information on both Reeves’ and Waller’s stances on topics ranging from healthcare and education to infrastructure.
If you would have polled Facebook or Twitter on Monday, you would have thought the race would have been closer than the 54-46% margin on Tuesday night.
You might have even thought Waller was going to pull off an upset, but it didn’t happen.
That is because Reeves, and his campaign handlers, have had their finger on the right pulse the entire time.
Reeves is a confident man, and after Tuesday’s runoff, he has every right be even more confident.
He was so confident that up until he was forced into a runoff with Waller on Aug. 6 he was campaigning against one man, and that was Jim Hood, not his Republican opponents.
Reeves knew at the end of the day how the vast majority of Mississippi Republican voters would cast their ballots.
No matter how much moderate conservatives clamor for a hike in fuel taxes, pay raises for educators or a conservative brand of Medicaid expansion, Reeves has stood his ground.
He hasn’t given an inch.
For folks in the middle of the road, these issues seem to be no-brainers, but Reeves hasn’t given them a second thought, neither as the state’s second in command nor as a candidate for the state’s top elected official.
He is adamantly against raising the fuel tax, something he says will only bring more tax burden on the state’s citizens.
The flip side to that coin is that a hike in the stagnant fuel tax would likely bring a fresh stream of revenue that would be used to repair a lot of the state’s crumbling infrastructure.
Another seemingly no-brainer is the reform of the state’s Medicaid system.
Richard Roberson, general counsel for the Mississippi Hospital Association, spoke to the Indianola Rotary Club on Tuesday about MS Cares, an initiative that would reform the state’s Medicaid system, alleviating hundreds of millions of dollars in uncompensated care that the state’s rural hospitals currently bear each year, and it would also bring more uninsured citizens into the system.
MS Cares is basically Medicaid expansion with a conservative flavor. It’s modeled after the Indiana plan which has been in effect for several years.
Roberson said MS Cares would not cost the state.
It would be 90% funded by federal dollars. The rest would be shored by higher hospital taxes and a small premium for those insured under the system.
This seems like a no-brainer, but to a politician like Reeves, it stinks of Obamacare, the bane of every conservative legislator’s existence since 2010.
Plans like the one in Indiana and MS Cares seek to bring real solutions to real problems without committing the state to socialized medicine.
It seems like the best of both worlds.
But in Reeves’ world, votes are all that matter, and the one sure fire way to get conservative votes is to label your opponent “liberal” and liken his healthcare policies to Obamacare.
And the non-politicians who have to operate these broken systems on a daily basis are caught in the crossfire.
Reeves’ fearmongering in the primary did enough to court the conservative vote, but if he’s not careful, his moderate Democratic opponent in the November election might steal some middle of the road conservatives who are fed up with potholes and rural hospital closures.
Reeves bet right in the primary, but if he doesn’t start moving more toward the center, he might lose that bet in November.
