Election season’s not quite over. We have two high-profile runoffs, one for Georgia Secretary of State and one for Mississippi U.S. Senate. In both cases, no candidate reached 50%, as required by state law there. Both races are highly consequential. Therefore the thermometer at left has been updated.

The Georgia Secretary of State race goes to a runoff on December 4th. This year’s general election in Georgia was filled with controversy, consequent to Secretary of State (and now Governor-elect) Brian Kemp’s aggressive voter-purge tactics. If even a small fraction of the 400,000 challenged and postcard-purged registrations were legitimate, that might have been enough to affect the gubernatorial election. The candidates are John Barrow (D) and Brad Raffensperger (R). The general election was Raffensperger 49.1%, Barrow 48.6%, Duval (L) 2.2%. 1.0%=39,000 votes.

This election is highly consequential for 2020 and 2022. The winner will administer elections – and voting rights – for 2020 and 2022. Georgia is a partisan trifecta – the governor’s mansion and legislature are under single-party control, in time for redistricting (sound familiar?). If the Republican, Raffensperger, wins as Secretary of State, that makes it a…quadrifecta, I guess…for individual and aggregate voting rights.

The Mississippi Senate race is very much in the news, with the election coming up this Tuesday, November 27. Like the Alabama special election in 2017 between Roy Moore (R) and Doug Jones (D), this race is a battle between the old South and the new South. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) said she’d “attend a public hanging” if a friend invited her; this is a phrase that was last used in the age of lynchings. Today it emerges that Hyde-Smith attended a “segregation academy,” one of many that were set up to help whites evade school desegregation. The Mississippi Legislature even handed out vouchers to whites to attend them. More recently, Hyde-Smith sent her daughter to attend one of these academies. The November election was Hyde-Smith 41.5%, Espy 40.6%, with most remaining votes going to another Republican. Turnout may matter on Tuesday.

The ActBlue thermometer at left has been updated to focus on Barrow and Espy. If you want to donate to Republicans, here are links to Hyde-Smith and to Raffensperger.