Editorial Roundup: Mississippi
Columbus Dispatch. November 3, 2023.
Editorial: Election day decision: Turn out or tune out?
Tuesday is election day for county, district and state-wide offices in Mississippi. Contrary to what you often hear, 100% of eligible voters will participate in this election.
Many voters will perform their civic duty by going to the polls and making their choices. Many others will exercise a different choice – a choice not to vote.
So really, it’s a matter of voter turn-out vs. voter tune-out. Each of us will fall into one camp or the other. We urge everyone to be part of the turn-out.
To those who are inclined to tune out, we urge you to consider the words of Greek statesman Perecles from more than 2,500 years ago: “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”
The people who are chosen through our election process can and do have a direct bearing on our lives. Understanding that, who would not want to have some say in the matter?
Mid-20th Century education reformer John Dewey described the importance of voting with a simple metaphor: “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”
Extending the metaphor, if and where the shoe pinches are the problems and issues that really affect us as opposed to campaign rhetoric designed primarily to deflect attention or inflame passions.
The purpose of elections is to identify real issues (where the shoe pinches) and choose candidates who acknowledge those issues and are best prepared to address them (the expert shoemakers).
When you choose not to vote, you are saying the issues you care about don’t matter. Your absence from the polls hurts all of us who may struggle with those same issues. There is power in numbers, after all.
“Bad officials are elected by good citizens who don’t vote,” is the way magazine editor and critic George Jean Nathan put it years ago.
So, if you are among those registered voters who may have chosen to sit this election out, we urge you to reconsider, not just for your benefit, but for the benefit of us all.
In the few days left before the election, we encourage readers to familiarize themselves with the candidates, especially local candidates whose outreach efforts may be limited. A good way to do that is to check out updated versions of The Dispatch’s Voter Guides, which you can access by going to cdispatch.com/eedition, scrolling down to Special Sections then clicking on the link “Columbus General Election Voter’s Guide 2023” or “Starkville General Election Voter’s Guide.” We’ve updated the guides to only include local candidates who are appearing in the general election.
Sample ballots will appear in Saturday’s print edition.
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Greenwood Commonwealth. November 3, 2023.
Editorial: A GOP Slate With One Hesitation
Most of the statewide attention in Mississippi for next week’s general election has been directed at the governor’s race between Tate Reeves, the Republican incumbent, and his Democratic challenger, Brandon Presley.
There are, however, seven other statewide contests on the ballot as well. Unlike some recent previous elections, in which the Democrats didn’t even bother to field a candidate for each contest, this time all seven of the Republican incumbents have Democratic opponents, although the majority of the challengers have run token campaigns.
We recommend voting for all seven Republican incumbents: Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, Secretary of State Michael Watson, Attorney General Lynn Fitch, State Auditor Shad White, Treasurer David McRae, Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson and Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney.
All for the most part have carried out their duties competently, all have been free of scandal, all deserve a second term.
If we have any reservations, they pertain to only one of the seven — Lynn Fitch.
Fitch is completing her first term as the state’s chief legal officer after serving eight years as state treasurer.
Perhaps this is true of all attorneys general, but Fitch has been particularly selective on what areas of the law her agency focuses. She seems to mostly like what’s in prosecutorial vogue — social media abuses and human trafficking, for example — while ignoring the parts of her job that are arguably much more important and require more guts to carry out.
Under her leadership, the Attorney General’s Office has been weak at pursuing those who steal or misspend government money, including being a total nonentity in prosecuting the massive welfare scandal. It’s done little to enforce the state’s campaign finance laws. Most recently, it has been criticized for turning a blind eye to illegal foreign ownership of agricultural land. Veiled criticism of her misplaced priorities have come from none other than fellow GOP state officials, including Hosemann, White and Watson.
The main reason we would give Fitch four more years to do better, though, is her successful effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that had legalized abortion on demand. It admittedly took a conservative takeover of the nation’s highest court to make this possible. Nevertheless, Fitch deserves credit for guiding Mississippi’s defense of a pro-life law, which became the genesis for returning abortion policy to the states to individually decide. The Dobbs case was a monumental step in protecting the unborn if not everywhere at least in the states where inconvenience is not considered a valid reason to terminate a human life.
Fitch’s Democratic opponent, Greta Kemp Martin, is on the wrong side of this issue. Her main motivation for entering the race was to defend abortion rights. Although some of her positions, such as aggressively prosecuting public corruption and creating a civil rights division to evaluate discrimination cases, have merit, we can’t get past her belief that a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy — no matter the reason — supersedes the unborn’s right to live.
Therefore, we endorse Fitch while hoping, should she win, that she will listen to those who are frustrated with her seeming indifference to fulfilling some of her major duties.
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