ABC News: “Brandon Presley doesn’t want to be compared to Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear or any of the other Democratic governors elected in recent cycles to serve in reliably red states like Kansas and Louisiana.
“Let me be clear about this … I’m my own man,” Presley in an interview with ABC News.
Presley is a Mississippi public service commissioner and former mayor of Nettleton, Mississippi, who happens to share a paternal great-grandfather with Elvis. And he’s battling in one of 2023’s trio of gubernatorial races.
Looking to flip a seat for the first time in two decades by defeating incumbent Republican Tate Reeves is a tall order. But the challenge has excited some Democrats in and outside of the state, where party strategists maintain that a path to victory, however narrow, does exist.
“I think statistically, one of the hardest races to win is against an incumbent governor,” Marshall Cohen, a former political director at the Democratic Governors Association, told ABC News.
“In order to beat an incumbent, you kind of need three things,” Cohen said. “You need a flawed incumbent, you need an above average, good challenger and you need an issue environment that is favorable to the challenger. And I think what you have in Mississippi is really all three of those things.””