Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann is seeking re-election to a second term to that powerful office, where he oversees the 52-seat Mississippi Senate. Among those state senators is Sen. Chris McDaniel, a straight-talking firebrand who is challenging the quiet-mannered Hosemann for the second-highest state office.
Jameson Taylor is director of policy and legislative affairs at Mississippi-based AFA Action. Hence he is also familiar with Magnolia State politics and its leaders, including Hosemann and McDaniel.
“Lieutenant governor is the most powerful person in the state of Mississippi,” Taylor explains, “and a lot of that power comes from appointing chairmen of committees.”
Taylor, who works closely with state senators on legislation, says he supports McDaniel over Hosemann in the August 8 Republican primary. That is because Taylor has witnessed pro-life legislation die in a Senate committee because a Democrat, appointed by the pro-life Hosemann, killed the bill.
“He’s used Democrats basically to conceal the fact that he is not a conservative Republican,” Taylor says of Lt. Gov. Hosemann.
'We all got elected'
In 2020, when Lt. Gov. Hosemann gaveled the Senate into session on his first day, news website Mississippi Today reported Republican senators got most of the “plum” assignments but a Democrat was chosen to chair the powerful Public Health Committee.
“You’ll see Democrats and Republicans heading committees here,” Hosemann bragged at the time. “You’ll see males and females heading committees here. I see no difference in whether it’s a man or woman, Republican or Democrat, minority or whatever. We all got elected.”
In 2022, when McDaniel was teasing a challenge to Hosemann, he complained to Mississippi Today that 13 of 16 Democrats held chairmanships under a Republican lieutenant governor.
Lt. Gov. Hosemann is the “best thing that’s happened to Democrats in this state in a generation,” McDaniel complained last year.
A repeat of Cochran strategy?
After the Republican lieutenant governor collaborated with Senate Democrats over committee assignments, Taylor says Hosemann is now relying on Democrat voters to use Mississippi’s open primary to support him over McDaniel.
“His strategy is to try to turn out Democrats to vote in the Republican primary,” Taylor advises. “He even has a poll that shows that he wins if Democrats are able to hijack the Republican primary.”
If that scenario sounds familiar to Mississippi voters, that is because McDaniel was defeated under similar circumstances in 2014, when he challenged Sen. Thad Cochran in the GOP primary. Faced with the near-impossible task of unseating a powerful and popular U.S. senator, McDaniel witnessed Cochran’s campaign woo black Democrats in Mississippi to vote in the GOP primary.
That unusual cooperation was also marred with accusations of vote-buying schemes involving influential black pastors in majority-black Mississippi counties. After the primary, one black Baptist pastor alleged he had collaborated with Cochran campaign staffers to pay black Mississippians $15 if they voted in the GOP primary. Blacks were urged to vote for Cochran because they were told McDaniel was a “racist" candidate who must be defeated, the pastor said.
Cochran narrowly defeated McDaniel 50.8% to 49.2% in the 2014 GOP primary.
In his interview with AFN, Taylor did not make similar allegations against Hosemann's re-election campaign. However, he did point out the current lieutenant governor was serving as Mississippi's secretary of state at the time, when Hosemann was supposed to be investigating campaign irregularities.
“If conservatives show up, Chris McDaniel will win,” Taylor says of the lieutenant governor’s race. “If Democrats show up, the moderate Delbert Hosemann will win.”
Editor's Note: AFA Action is an affiliate of the American Family Association, the parent organization of the American Family News Network, which operates AFN.net.
