President Donald Trump is scheduled to campaign for incumbent U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Corinth on Monday, eight days before the general election. It will be his fifth campaign appearance in Mississippi, all but one for her.
The first rally for Hyde-Smith was on Oct. 2, 2018, at the Landers Center in Southaven, five weeks before a special election she was appointed into. “A vote for Cindy is a vote for me,” Trump told that crowd, according to the record of his remarks.
She did not win it outright. The Nov. 6 election sent her to a runoff against Democrat Mike Espy.
Trump came back. On Nov. 26, 2018, he spoke at the Tupelo Regional Airport and then at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi, both on the night before voters returned to the polls.
“I’m here to ask the people of Mississippi to send Cindy Hyde-Smith back to the United States Senate,” Trump said in Tupelo.
In Biloxi, he put it differently. “Cindy Hyde-Smith, we have to get her in,” he said. “We need her. We need her badly.”
Hyde-Smith won the runoff the next day with 53.6 percent of the vote.
Trump’s fourth Mississippi appearance was four days before the governor’s race, on Nov. 1, 2019, when he returned to Tupelo for Tate Reeves, who was running against Attorney General Jim Hood.
“I can’t believe this is a competitive race,” Trump said that night at BancorpSouth Arena. “It’s embarrassing.”
Reeves won with 459,396 votes to Hood’s 414,368.
Corinth is in Alcorn County, in the state’s northeast corner near the Tennessee line, in the First Congressional District. Trump has not campaigned there before.
The Mississippi Independent asked Hyde-Smith’s campaign last week whether a rally was planned in Mississippi before Nov. 3, and whether she had turned one down, as Trump had said. The campaign did not answer either question.
Trump had said in March that Hyde-Smith told her she did not need him to campaign for her. Introducing her at a White House event on March 12, two days after she won the Republican primary, he told the room he had offered to campaign on her behalf and gave her response as “I don’t need any rallies, sir.”
As Trump’s popularity has plummeted, even in red states including Mississippi, many Republican candidates have tried to distance themselves from him, fearing a close association will hurt their chances of election. Polls show that Trump is the least popular president at this point in their term in more than four decades.
Hyde-Smith has remained an ardent and public supporter. Trump has described her as “100 percent MAGA.”
Democrat Scott Colom and Independent Ty Pinkins are also on the Nov. 3 ballot.
Image: President Trump being escorted across the tarmac (via White House/Flickr)
