Mississippi
No surprise. In a country where you need photo ID to breathe, the first election in a state after it enacted a voter photo ID requirement went smoothly.
That’s not the point. It’s not that voter photo ID will disenfranchise anyone or cause election day to be rocky or will really be much of a deterrent to voter fraud. The reason the left, especially the black civil rights groups, ride it as a hobby horse, is to gin up memories of the 1960s and the civil rights movement and of Martin Luther King marching in the minds of elderly black women, to remind them of the days when they were young black women and they supposedly had no rights and the 1960s and the Democrats “freed” them, the obvious implication is that voter photo ID is just the start of a vast conspiracy to turn back the clock to segregation and then to slavery, and that all these old black women better get out and vote (elderly black women do most of the voting in the black community) to stop this RepubliKKKan conspiracy.
I wonder if, after the current generation of elderly black women that remember the civil rights movement as a matter of their conscious lifetimes start moving on from this world to the next world, the total raw number of black voters is going to start declining.
As an aside, since this story is about the state of Mississippi and its election last week, I should note that even though Chris McDaniel got more votes than Thad Cochran but couldn’t himself break 50% necessitating a runoff two weeks from tomorrow, that he did this well and got this far is illustrative of something. Consider this: In the 60 year time period between 1947 and 2007, the state of Mississippi only had four individual people represent it in the United States Senate: James Eastland, John Stennis, Trent Lott, Thad Cochran. Point being, it’s an electorate that even more than average rewards incumbency. It’s a red letter day in political history when an incumbent United States Senator anywhere loses in his or her party’s primary, but if it winds up happening in incumbent-friendly Mississippi of all places, it’s a political event akin to Chicxulub.
