Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won a Senate runoff election in Mississippi on Tuesday night, beating her Democratic challenger Mike Espy in what had become a tumultuous contest in the state.
Hyde-Smith and Espy were vying for the seat in a deep-red state where President Donald Trump took nearly 58% of the vote in 2016.
Hyde-Smith, the state's former agriculture and commerce commissioner who was appointed to the Senate seat in March after Sen. Thad Cochran resigned, was favored to win, despite recent criticism she received after telling a supporter she would attend a "public hanging," if invited.
That remark conjured Mississippi's history of racism, lynchings, and Jim Crow laws — and caused a handful of companies to withdraw their support for Hyde-Smith's campaign. She has apologized for the comment.
Espy had sought to capitalize on the fallout from Hyde-Smith's missteps, as well as subsequent revelations that his Republican opponent attended a "segregation academy" and celebrated the Confederacy .
But he, too, faced significant headwinds on the road to Washington.
An assessment from FiveThirtyEight indicated that Espy would need an "unprecedented" swing in order to win Tuesday night.
Some Democrats held out hope for Espy citing a resemblance between the Mississippi runoff and the December 2017 special election in neighboring Alabama, where voters chose Democrat Doug Jones over the embattled Republican Roy Moore , whose campaign was crushed under the weight of a sexual-misconduct scandal.
The Alabama election gave the state its first Democratic senator in more than two decades, but that energy did not transfer to Mississippi, which has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1972.
NOW WATCH: Trump once won a lawsuit against the NFL — but the result was an embarrassment
See Also:
- Mississippi's Republican Senate candidate is feeling the heat after it's revealed that she attended a 'segregation academy' and celebrated the Confederacy
- Trump to square off with protesters in Mississippi as he returns to the campaign trail
- 'Another black eye': Accusations of racism swirl in contentious Mississippi Senate runoff
SEE ALSO: Mississippi's Republican Senate candidate is feeling the heat after it's revealed that she attended a 'segregation academy' and celebrated the Confederacy