Hadley Hitson
With Election Day just four days away, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy brought his campaign bus — named The Momentum — to Oxford to hold a rally and campaign against his opponent, incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, on Thursday, Oct. 29.
Espy said he and his team decided to visit Oxford because it is one of the northeast “hubs” in Mississippi, along with Tupelo, that are “crucial” to balance his lack of support in other areas of the state. He also said that he specifically wanted to reach more college-aged voters.
“The more stories I tell, the more I can relate to them, that their struggles and their difficulties sync up with my struggles and my difficulties, then I think we’re going to get the youth vote,” Espy said.
While Espy said he often thought about leaving the state for good as he grew up in Yazoo City and, he now wants to incentivize young people to graduate from college and stay in Mississippi.
“If you have student debt, we want to have a program to reduce it, maybe not eliminate it, but reduce it if you would agree to give time after you graduate to lift up some place like the Mississippi Delta,” Espy said.
He also said he wants to create more job opportunities for students in the state by replicating partnerships like that between FedEx and Mississippi Valley State University.
With these student-specific platforms, Espy said he is hoping to attract more college-aged voters this election cycle.
“I noticed that the last time I ran a few months ago, I didn’t get enough votes from the youth, from the college sector as we really should, and I think that’s because they didn’t know me,” Espy said.
Espy and Hyde-Smith ran against each other for the same Senate seat in a 2018 special election after former Sen. Thad Cochran’s resignation in April of that year.
“We only had about six and a half months to run, but with your help, we got 47% of the statewide vote in Mississippi,” Espy said to the crowd. “Even though my heart was heavy, my spirit was light because I said to myself, ‘Mike, if you can get 47% of the vote with no staff, hardly raising any money from scratch, if you can get from zero to 47, all you need is more time.’ So, we’ve been running for 19 months.”
According to The New York Times, the vote distribution in the 2018 election was 46.1% to Espy and 53.9% to Hyde-Smith. Since then, the Espy campaign has raised $5.3 million in the 2020 election cycle, and the Hyde-Smith campaign has raised $2.85 million.
A new poll commissioned by the left-leaning political blog Daily Kos showed that Hyde-Smith has an eight point lead on Espy. However, Espy said his campaign team has conducted three polls within the last two weeks with results that show he and his team “are tied in this race.”
“That’s great, but these are numbers on a piece of paper,” Espy said. “I tell my folks, I want to be just like Jesus on Easter Sunday. Those numbers have to rise.”
The central point of division between Espy and Hyde-Smith this election cycle has been healthcare, and in his rally on Thursday evening, Espy said he intends to be known as “the healthcare senator.”
While Espy wants to expand the provision of medical care to people with low income through Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, Hyde-Smith supports President Donald Trump’s effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
In addition to expanding Medicaid, he said he wants to ensure that rural hospitals in the state — many of which have been on the verge of closing for the past decade — have the funding and resources to remain operational.
Election Day is Nov. 3, and polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
