http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...i-democratic-governor-nomination-zero-dollars A new Governor or is it Dem candidate for Governor (I didn't find the article to be all that well written) claims to have not spent any money on his campaign.
Probably both are factors. I wonder, does Mississippi allow cross party voting? If so, he may have received some Republican votes as an effort to nominate the most useless Democrat. @Nova, any thoughts?
Mississippi primaries are essentially open. You don't need party registration to vote in a primary and you can vote in any party's primary so long as you don't openly declare to oppose that party's nominee in the general election and you vote in only one primary.
In the primaries, it is open EXCEPT that if there's a run-off only those who voted in the primary for that party can vote in the run-off. I doubt there was cross-party voting though because Gov. Bryant is untouchable. The two factors mentioned surely had SOME impact BUT, here's the deciding factor: He may not have campaigned, but you can rest assured the Black Democratic operatives made sure the black voters knew there was one of their own on the ballot. I'd say that was a much bigger factor than the gender issue.
Given that the Republican incumbent got 61% of the vote last time and none of the candidates in the Democratic primary held any kind of office, it seems likely that the Democratic party has decided not to contest this one, and as a result, nobody cared. The other factors people have mentioned probably came into it too, but many of the people who turned out probably did so because of downticket elections and just picked a gubernatorial candidate at random. The Democratic party in my congressional district, a couple years ago when the Republican incumbent looked unbeatable, nominated a nut who liked to rant about chemtrails and wrote for InfoWars. He beat, by a significant margin, a county party chairman who, while he had never held office, at least had some political experience plus a shred of sanity. But because the party had decided not to contest the seat, nobody gave a damn.
