The Mississippi Independent

06/23/2026

“Let’s be clear about what Michael Watson is doing,” Taylor told The Mississippi Independent. “He is laying the administrative groundwork to hand Republicans a political windfall before a single public hearing has been held, before a single map has been drawn, and before Mississippi voters have had any say."

Mississippi elections chief says his office is following an administrative mandate

06/22/2026

At its core, the speculation is rooted in a lack of transparency surrounding the construction of data centers and related utility infrastructure across the South. Local residents have become acutely aware of the potential for significant, unexpected developments as a result of deals negotiated off-screen. When reliable information is not forthcoming, the rumor mill clicks into gear.

As the regional electric utility Entergy searches for new power sources for rapidly expanding data centers, the buzz in Port Gibson, Mississippi is that a new reactor will be built at the Grand Gulf nuclear plant to service a facility under construction in Louisiana.

06/19/2026

The setting is the same as it has been since 1889, with a network of wooden cabins arranged along footpaths, a central square and a horse-racing track. The location in Neshoba County is otherwise freighted: The fairgrounds are a few miles from the site where, in the summer of 1964, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—were murdered by Ku Klux Klan members while working to register Black voters. Their deaths became emblematic of the violent resistance to Black political participation during Freedom Summer and remain among the more notorious crimes of the civil rights era.

The Neshoba County Fair opens today, and next week Mississippi’s political class will again gather beneath the oaks of Founder’s Square.

06/19/2026

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson's effort to preserve the law’s grace period has put him at odds with GOP attempts to restrict mail-in voting. The Republican National Committee and the Trump administration have argued that under federal statutes setting a uniform Election Day means the ballot box closes at the end of the day.

Court ruling on Mississippi law could end mail-in ballot grace periods in 14 states, District of Columbia

06/15/2026

Advocates have long said people released from ICE facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi fall victim to taxi-fare extortion, despite federal detention standards that require facilities far from public transportation to provide free rides.

Those standards have largely been ignored in recent years, paving the way for unscrupulous drivers who have charged fares ranging from $200 to $600 per passenger for rides as short as 10 minutes.

Now, the Mississippi Independent has identified a connection between a Natchez-area driver accused of exploiting recently released immigrants and a longtime senior corrections officer at the privately run detention center, based on state and county records, social media posts and text messages.

Check the first comment for the link.

06/10/2026

Mississippi has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1982, and President Donald Trump carried the state by 23 points in 2024.

Scott Colom, the Democratic district attorney challenging incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, argues that the picture ratings describe is already out of date.

Colom points to a poll the Southern Policy Law Center Action Fund and Impact Research released in April, which The Mississippi Independent reported at the time. It found Hyde-Smith with an unfavorable rating of 55 percent and put Colom within three points of her in a head-to-head matchup, narrowing a gap that the same pollster had measured at 13 points in June 2025.

Every major election handicapper rates Mississippi’s 2026 U.S.

06/09/2026

The Mississippi Republican Party quietly added Trump's name to its annual gathering, which took place last week.

It's unclear what the group believes Trump has in common with Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation and defeated the Confederacy, which Mississippi was one of the first states to join.

But adding Trump’s name to civic and commercial branding is a pattern with its own history. The Trump Organization placed his name on hotels, residential towers, casinos, golf courses, steaks, vodka, bottled water and a university, including properties his company licensed to outside developers and did not own.

The thread running through the commercial and political naming is claiming places, institutions, and now political traditions associated with individual figures, some of whom are still living.

When the Mississippi Republican Party recently held its annual Lincoln-Reagan-Trump Gala at the Sheraton Refuge Hotel in Flowood, the party officially rebranded the fundraiser with its new name on printed invitations, which linked it to the nation’s 250

06/03/2026

An attorney representing the widow of an apprentice electrician who died earlier this month at a Calgon Carbon manufacturing plant in Bay St. Louis has accused Hancock County’s coroner—a former employee of the company—of spreading misinformation about the death and intimidating the man’s family.

Family also suggests a conflict, as coroner once worked at Calgon and became a full-time police officer a week before disputed death

06/02/2026

Mississippi has one of the South’s few remaining majority-Black congressional districts, and state Republicans—from Gov. Tate Reeves and State Auditor Shad White to the state party itself—have spent months saying they want it redrawn.

Why haven't they?

One clue could lie in the fact that making U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson’s 2nd Congressional District less Black requires making the three currently safe Republican districts around it more Black, and Mississippi’s three Republican incumbents do not have the margins to absorb the voters and stay safe.

Part 3 in a series on voting rights: Why Mississippi lawmakers aren't hurrying to join other southern states in eliminating a majority-Black district

05/29/2026

As Republican-led states move to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, conservatives in Mississippi have made an argument about what those districts are. The districts sort voters by race, they say, and dismantling them ends the sorting.

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson and the civil rights organizations defending his seat answer that the districts remedy racial discrimination and that removing them revives it. The two sides do not dispute that race shaped the maps. They disagree about which use of race the Constitution forbids.

Part 2 in a series on voting rights: How race influences redistricting