MAGEE, Mrs. (AP) – Congressional primary run-offs with rarities are rare in Mississippi. This year, two Republicans are struggling to keep their jobs in a run-off against their own party.
US Representative Stephen Palazzo is running for a seventh term and was considered vulnerable after being accused in a 2021 congressional ethics report of abusing his office by misappropriating campaign funds.
US representative Michael Guest is fighting for a third term. He voted to set up an independent commission to investigate the uprising in the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and was forced to run in a runoff amid criticism that he was disloyal to former President Donald Trump.
Both Palazzo and Guest failed to cross the 50% threshold to win a landslide victory in their June 7 primary. On Tuesday, Palazzo will face Mike Ezel, the sheriff of the coastal district, while Guest will face Michael Cassidy, a former pilot of a Navy fighter jet.
The Associated Press examined government records from 1952 and found that no American Mississippi officials had participated in the primary runoff in those 70 years.
The other two Mississippi congressmen, Democrat Benny Thompson and Republican Trent Kelly, easily won their primary this month.
Guest is Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes parts of Jackson and its suburbs covering the area where Guest was a district attorney before being elected to Congress. There are also small towns, poultry processing plants and military installations in the area, including one where Cassidy is still training pilots.
Away received 47.5% against Cassidy’s 47% on June 7 in a race with three candidates. Guest and Cassidy ran a separate campaign last week in the small town of Maggie, in a county where Guest did a little better than Cassidy in the first round of voting.
A guest calls his rival a “carpetbagger” because Cassidy moved to the Mississippi from the East Coast and only registered to vote here in 2021. Cassidy acknowledged the time of his registration, saying he remained a voter in one state while being relocated to others.
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Cassidy accuses Guest of betraying Trump by joining Democrats and 34 other Republicans in supporting the creation of a bipartisan commission to attack Jan. 6.
Weeks after the proposal failed in the U.S. Senate, Guest was among 190 Republicans who opposed the creation of a House of Representatives committee that spent months investigating the uprising and recently began televised hearings. He and Palazzo were among Republicans in the House of Representatives who opposed the certification of election results by some states that ran for Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.
Cassidy said in campaign speeches that Gest had done nothing to stop “the persecution of political prisoners since January 6.” During a dinner at Jose’s Restaurant & Grill in Magee, Cassidy criticized the committee that the Guest voted to support.
“The bill said that everyone who was up there that day was a domestic terrorist,” Cassidy said.
A guest rejects any idea that he was disloyal to Trump.
“They don’t want to talk about our 95% vote with Donald Trump, that we co-chaired his re-election campaign in Mississippi, that we voted against impeachment twice, and that we actually spoke on the floor in opposition to that,” said a guest before noon. a day a mile away at Zip’s Cafe.
The winner of the runoff between Gost and Cassidy will face Shuvaski Young in November. Young served in the US Department of Homeland Security during the presidency of Barack Obama.
Palazzo is the 4th Congressional District of Southeastern Mississippi, which includes the cities of Biloxi and Hattiesburg. The district’s economy relies heavily on the military and shipbuilding.
Palazzo served in the Marine Corps and the Mississippi Army National Guard. He was in the state legislature before ousting a longtime Democrat congressman in a tea party wave in 2010.
In 2021, a report from the Office of Ethics of Congress found “a compelling reason to believe that Palazzo abused his office by misappropriating campaign funds, rendering services to his brother, and recruiting staff for political and personal procurement. . His spokesman, Colleen Kennedy at the time, said the investigation was based on politically motivated “false allegations”.
In the primary, Palazzo received 31.5% of the vote against Ezel’s 25% in a race with seven candidates.
Ezel said Palazzo was ineffective in representing southern Mississippi and criticized Palazzo for proxy voting – the practice of not appearing in person to vote in the House, but allowing another member to vote for him.
In November, the winner of the run-off between Palazzo and Ezel will face Democrat Johnny L. Dupree, a former Hattiesburg mayor who was nominated by the Democrats for governor in 2011, and Libertarian Alden Patrick Johnson.
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