Fitch touts her role in 'Dobbs' and ties to Trump in launching bid to become first woman governor

In formally kicking off her campaign for governor, Attorney General Lynn Fitch leaned into the two accomplishments she’s most proud of: helping overturn Roe v. Wade and being a Donald Trump-style Republican. Yet both issues carry more political complexity in Mississippi than the campaign’s launch suggests.

“I’m the woman who protected life by overturning Roe v. Wade,” Fitch says in her announcement video, while also touting her support for President Donald Trump, her lawsuits over transgender rights, cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and efforts to combat human trafficking.

Fitch repeatedly invokes Trump throughout the nearly four-minute video, saying she backed him “from the beginning” and highlighting instances where she says his administration chose Mississippi as a partner on issues like immigration enforcement and anti-trafficking efforts.

Whether that strategy will be effective in 2027 is an open question.

While Trump remains popular in Mississippi, a new survey shows the president’s approval rating cratering nationally. Even in Mississippi, a state he won handily—twice—and hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide in two decades, Trump’s approval has fallen below 50 percent with more Mississippians disapproving of the president than approving of the job he’s doing.

Mississippi’s voters have also not always embraced anti-abortion measures when asked directly. In 2011, Mississippians rejected the so-called “personhood” constitutional amendment, which would have defined life as beginning at fertilization, and thus providing a path to banning abortion. The proposal failed by a 58 percent to 42 percent margin despite the state’s conservative electorate.

The case that would overturn Roe started with a law Mississippi passed in 2018 to ban abortion at 15 weeks. The state’s only abortion clinic at the time, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, sued. Representing the state as attorney general, Fitch kept appealing lower courts’ decisions to strike down the law until it reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 and the six-justice conservative majority ruled to overturn Roe, a precedent that stood for five decades.

Mississippi voters no longer have a way to place constitutional amendments on the ballot. The state Supreme Court invalidated the citizen initiative process in 2021 over a constitutional defect tied to congressional districts, and lawmakers have repeatedly failed to restore it. Since then, proposals to revive the process have often included restrictions preventing voters from using it to change abortion law.

Voters in several states, including Arizona, Missouri and Ohio, have in recent years voted to reinstate abortion rights using those states’ ballot referendum processes.

She joins a field to succeed Gov. Tate Reeves, who is term-limited, that includes Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson, who has campaigned for more than a year, and former House Speaker Philip Gunn, who entered this spring. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, State Auditor Shad White and businessman Tommy Duff are among the Republicans still weighing bids. No Democrat has announced. The primary is set for August 2027.

If she wins, Fitch would be the first woman elected governor of Mississippi. The state has never had one. The woman who came closest was Evelyn Gandy, a Democrat who was the first woman elected to statewide constitutional office in Mississippi and the first to serve as lieutenant governor. Gandy ran for governor three times. In 1979 and again in 1983, she led the first primary, and both times she lost the runoff, to William Winter and then to Bill Allain. She never reached the office. In the decades since, no woman has come as near.

Fitch enters the race as the official whose office is defending the state in the voting-rights cases now before the federal courts. Her office is the state’s lawyer in the suit over the Mississippi Supreme Court districts, which a federal judge has found dilute Black voting strength, and it defends the state’s election laws when they are challenged. Her chief of staff called an earlier ruling in the state’s favor in that case “a very good outcome for the State.” The next governor will inherit those cases, the fights over redrawing the congressional and legislative maps, and the disputes over who can vote that Fitch’s office has argued throughout her tenure.

The three declared Republicans have all worked closely with the groups that have shaped Mississippi policy for years. Gunn presided over the House that eliminated the state income tax, a goal the free-market Mississippi Center for Public Policy had pushed for more than a decade. White worked at that organization’s legal arm, the Mississippi Justice Institute, before he won statewide office. Fitch built her national name on Dobbs and her support for Trump. The 2027 primary will test which of the three Republican voters prefer.

Fitch has held statewide office since 2012, when she was first elected treasurer, and she became the first Republican elected attorney general since Reconstruction in 2019. Her tour opened Tuesday and runs through the week, with stops in Jackson, Hattiesburg, Gulfport, Meridian, Columbus, Tupelo, Cleveland and Southaven. The qualifying deadline for the 2027 elections is Feb. 1.

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Image: Republican Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (via Lynn Fitch for Mississippi Facebook)