By Bob Moser @ NewYorker.com, Aug. 2

[....] The Republicans now had a real fight on their hands, pitting two distinct brands of conservatism—the slash-and-burn absolutism of Reeves, who also championed this year’s fetal-heartbeat law, and the commonsensical problem-solving of Waller, who often sounds like a relic of pre-Tea Party Republicanism—against each other. The mild-mannered son of a nineteen-seventies governor, Waller isn’t cut out for old-fashioned mudslinging, though his original campaign slogan took a swipe at Reeves, whose approval rating is around thirty-seven per cent: “Shouldn’t you like your candidate for governor? Now you can.” He supports Medicaid expansion, wants to raise the state’s gas tax to pay for infrastructure repairs, pledges to raise teacher salaries by a thousand dollars each year until they match the average in the Southeast, and talks about little else as he trods the state, sometimes campaigning seventeen hours a day in the hope that shoe-leather effort can overcome Reeves’s ten-to-one edge in campaign funds. “The facts are mean things,” Waller said, on August 1st, at this year’s Neshoba Fair, ticking off the troubles faced by the state.

Though Reeves had sewn up the support of most leading Republicans before Waller leapt in, four former state Republican chairs are backing the former justice—mainly because they’ve decided that enough is enough. “Our infrastructure is crumbling,” Clarke Reed, one of the fathers of the modern Mississippi G.O.P., said. “We need a gas-tax increase. Everybody knows it.” Mike Retzer, a Delta businessman who led the party in both the late seventies and the nineties, said, “Tate had an opportunity, a great opportunity to do some good for our state. Republicans are against taxes, but our roads and bridges are in trouble. Now we’re totally locked in.”

The sharp contrast between Reeves and Waller has made for an unexpectedly entertaining summer of politicking in Mississippi [....]