Fitch touts her role in 'Dobbs' and ties to Trump in launching gubernatorial bid
Both issues are more complicated in Mississippi than one might think
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.
Image: Republican Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (via Lynn Fitch for Mississippi Facebook)