Mississippi votes Tuesday in a Senate runoff election, capping the 2018 midterms

Mississippi voters go to the polls Tuesday for the last election of 2018, the Senate runoff between Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) and Democrat Mike Espy, a former congressman and Clinton administration agriculture secretary. Hyde-Smith was appointed to temporarily replace former Sen. Thad Cochran, and the winner of Tuesday's election will serve out the remaining two years of Cochran's term.

Hyde-Smith, 59, is favored to win, but her campaign has been roiled by recent comments about sitting "on the front row" of "a public hanging" and a purported joke about making it difficult for students and "liberal folks" to vote, plus newly unearthed photographs and video appearing to show her laud the Confederacy and recent reports that both she and her daughter attended private "segregation academy" schools set up to help white students avoid school desegregation. Adding to the racially charged tenor of the campaign, seven nooses were found hanging from trees outside the Mississippi Capitol on Monday, accompanied by handwritten signs referencing Tuesday's election and Mississippi's dark history of lynching.

While Espy's campaign has been painting Hyde-Smith as an embarrassing reminder of Mississippi's segregationist past, Hyde-Smith and other Republicans have been highlighting Espy's $750,000 lobbying contract with Ivory Coast's Cocoa and Coffee Board in 2011, and his trial on charges of illicitly accepting gifts in the 1990s — he resigned from President Bill Clinton's Cabinet, was tried on 30 corruption charges, and acquitted on all 30.

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Working to ensure a Republican victory, President Trump held two rallies for Hyde-Smith on Monday, and GOP groups poured $4 million into the runoff, versus $1.2 million from Democratic groups. If Hyde-Smith wins, she will be the first woman ever elected to Congress from Mississippi and Republicans will control 53 seats in the 100-seat Senate. Espy, 64, would be Mississippi's first black senator since Reconstruction and the first Mississippi Democrat elected to the Senate since 1982.