MS-01: County Baselines

Polls close in Mississippi at 8pm Eastern. We’ll be tracking and liveblogging the returns as they come in, but in order to really know what the numbers mean, we’ll have to pull up the county-by-county results of the April 22nd special primary, filtering out the also-rans so we get a pure Childers vs. Davis head-to-head:

Steve Holland (D) and Glenn McCullough (R), previously defeated in the April 1st primary runoff, won 1.17% and 1.44% of the vote, respectively.

Davis won 8 of the district’s 24 counties in the first round, but the biggest chunk of his votes came from the Memphis suburbs in DeSoto County, which contains his home base of South Memphis Southaven. Because of its sheer voting power, DeSoto has the potential of being a game-ender for Childers if Davis can keep the numbers close throughout the rest of the district.

Childers will need to do his best to run up the score in Prentiss (his home county), neighboring Alcorn, and key spots like Chickasaw (41% black), Clay (56% black), Marshall (50% black), and other friendly areas in Northeast Mississippi. We’ll also see if Childers and the DCCC have been able to turnout crucial votes in counties like that Davis won like Panola (48% black), Grenada (41% black), and Yalobusha (39% black). More ballots were cast for Democrats than for Republicans in these counties in the April 1st primary runoff, but some of those votes didn’t turn out for Childers in the first round of the special election.

A key bellwether here will be Lee County, where Tupelo is located. It’s a county that normally tilts Republican in statewide and federal races, but Davis’ savage attacks in the GOP primary against Tupelo’s former mayor, Glenn McCullough, didn’t do much to inspire enthusiasm for his bid here: Childers won the county by 58%-37% on April 22nd. But if Davis closes the gap here, Childers may have a hard time coming out on top.

For good measure, I’m adding the county-by-county numbers for the primary run-off below the fold.