Mississippi at a Glance State Profile - Gov. Musgrove (D) - Sen. Cochran (R) - Sen. Lott (R) Presidential Politics Congressional Districting - 01 - Wicker (R) - 02 - Thompson (D) - 03 - Pickering Jr. (R) - 04 - Shows (R) - 05 - Taylor (D) Almanac 2000 Home States & Districts Elected Officials For district profiles and additional information on the elected officials of Mississippi, please use the pull-down menu above.

A few decades ago, Jackson was a small town centered on the grand Beaux Arts 1901 state Capitol. Today, Jackson is clearly the metropolis of Mississippi, the pivot point between the Delta and the hills, the rivers flowing sluggishly to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico and the highways running north to Memphis and Chicago. Like Mississippi generally, it is racially divided, with a black, not-so-affluent south side and a white affluent north side; in its new subdivisions of pleasant, large colonial houses under huge, overhanging trees, you can get a sense of what growth has meant to Jackson--especially when you consider that at least some of the people in these neighborhoods came from humble, rural Mississippi beginnings. This newer Mississippi contrasts with Natchez, where the finest collection of antebellum mansions sit on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. Natchez had white millionaires and half the state's free blacks before the Civil War; it was content enough to oppose secession, and was spared major damage in the war because it was of no military importance. Both Jackson and Natchez went through an ugly decade during the civil rights revolution: Mississippi blacks were murdered for registering to vote or for seeking higher-paying jobs; today, the cities are more open, with more social contact between the races than in most northern metropolitan areas, but there is still yearning for economic growth and high-skill jobs.

The 4th Congressional District includes most of Jackson (excluding most black areas, which are in the black-majority 2d) and all of Natchez; it extends east to Laurel and south to the Louisiana line. This is an area that has trended Republican in national and state-wide elections, as newly affluent white Mississippians vote for a party they associate with economic growth and assertive foreign policy, while blacks remain pretty solidly Democratic. But in local contests, Democrats still win many races.

Indeed, the congressman from the 4th District, Ronnie Shows, is a Democrat elected in 1998. Shows grew up on a farm in Jones County, went to two junior colleges and graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi--the first college graduate in his family. As he puts it, ''I started my way on the bottom and worked up. I started as a teacher and coach. I worked on a farm, washed dishes in a restaurant.'' He taught in junior high and elementary schools and two private academies. In 1976, at 29, he was elected Jefferson Davis County Clerk; he moved up twice by winning elections to fill vacancies, to the state Senate in 1980 and as southern district transportation commissioner in 1988. He was re-elected twice without opposition, but the job gave him lots of opportunity to make friends throughout an area that covers 13 of the 15 counties of the 4th District, even as he stayed in his two-bedroom house in tiny Bassfield. He was as well positioned as anyone to run when in January 1998 4th District Congressman Mike Parker, elected as a Democrat in 1988 and a switcher to the Republicans in 1995, announced he would not run again, and would probably run for governor in 1999.

Republicans were favored to hold this district, which voted twice against Bill Clinton, and the Republican primary outdrew the Democrats, with nine candidates rather than three and 59% of the primary votes. But just as Democrats in the old days bruised themselves and sapped their energy in vigorously contested primaries and runoffs, so did Republicans here. Shows won the primary in June, topping the 50% mark with 54% against two black candidates, attorney Carroll Rhodes and Natchez Councilwoman and high school teacher Joyce Arceneaux. The initial favorite for the Republican nod was Art Rhodes, Parker's chief of staff, whom he endorsed in January, but Rhodes had little backing in Jackson and Hinds County, which cast 39% of the votes. The leader there was Delbert Hosemann, a tax lawyer with a 225-lawyer law firm, Jackson's largest, who had served on many civic boards but had not run for office before. Also competitive were Phil Davis, from Simpson County, who won 14% of the vote in the 1988 primary (when only 25% of all voters voted in the Republican primary, versus 59% in 1998); Pike County District Attorney Dunn Lampton; and Heath Hall, former press secretary to Governor Kirk Fordice.

All five were running within close range of each other, when odd mailings started to appear in the last days before the primary--what looked like a letter from the ACLU endorsing Rhodes because he was against school prayer and what looked like a letter from Hall promising to move into the district if he was elected. Hosemann, with the gimlet eye of a tax lawyer, noticed that misspellings on Davis's campaign mailing labels matched those on the fake ACLU brochure (Rhodes, like just about every politician in Mississippi, is in favor of school prayer) and accused Davis of violating federal law; the FBI started investigating. Hosemann ran first in the June 2 primary, with 37% of the vote in Hinds County and 21% overall. Davis was second, with 18.0%, just 87 votes ahead of Rhodes's 17.7%; Lampton had 15% and Hall 12%. In the three weeks before the runoff, Hosemann ran an ad on the subject: ''Dirty tricks, negative phone calls, false mailings and an FBI investigation. Mr. Davis, we deserve better. We demand an answer.'' Hosemann won the June 23 runoff 56%-44%, chiefly because of his 62%-38% margin in Hinds County, which cast 47% of the votes; in the rest of the district Hosemann led by just 58 votes. Nine months later, in March 1999, Davis was indicted by U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott (who lost to Parker in the 1988 Democratic runoff) for violating the Watergate-era law, apparently never before used in a prosecution, banning misidentifying the source of a campaign mailing. The tantalizing question is whether the mailing changed the outcome in November. It probably enabled Davis to overtake Rhodes and get into the runoff. Would Rhodes have been able to beat Hosemann in the runoff? If so, would he have run better than the citified Hosemann ran against Shows in the general? No one can know for sure.

Certainly in the general Shows displayed greater political skills and strength. From his work as highway commissioner, he started off with more name identification. He was heavily outspent, and Hosemann started off early with ads that attacked him for liberal votes in the legislature on taxes and education and charged him with weakness on gun owners' rights. Shows campaigned in his good ole boy manner, and charged that Hosemann was a wealthy big city lawyer out of touch with rural areas and unable to relate to the problems of ordinary people. He opposed abortion rights and supported gun owners' rights. He was endorsed by the Blue Dog Democrats in Washington, and he compared himself to the highly popular Gene Taylor, Democratic congressman in the 5th District. In a 41% black district, he did not take black voters for granted, but appeared constantly in black churches and sought to capitalize on black voters' continuing bitterness over Parker's 1995 party-switch. ''In every race I've ever run in, I've always gotten a good African American vote. The reason is I've always been fair. Black or white, Asian, Hispanic, it just doesn't make any difference to us. People are people and want to be treated with respect.''

When Hurricane Georges struck Mississippi in September 1998, Shows took advantage of his office by donning blue jeans and going out in a highway department truck talking to people and monitoring the damage; Hosemann stuck to his schedule and made phone calls and attended a Farm Bureau luncheon. And when it came time to go up with the ads he could afford, Shows hit target. One ad featured his gravelly-voiced father, a World War II veteran who talked of his military experiences at the Battle of the Bulge and his pride in his son who got an education and worked to help people; at the end Shows said, ''Thanks, Dad.'' Another accused Hosemann's law firm of freeing a murderer (actually, in a pro bono case it got a sentence reduced from death to life). Another tactic, Republicans charged, were phone calls to seniors saying that Hosemann would cut Social Security.

Shows won a solid 53%-45% victory, all the more impressive because he was outspent more than 2-1. Shows joined the Blue Dog Democrats in the House and won seats on the Transportation and Veterans' Affairs Committees. He will probably be targeted by Republicans in 2000, but they will have to show more political acumen if they want to beat him. Another threat could be redistricting. Mississippi is likely to lose a district and, under prevailing interpretations of the Voting Rights Act, must have at least one black-majority district. That means the legislature must add black voters to the population-losing 2d District, and they will have to come from the 4th, which would obviously hurt Shows. But that is some distance down the road.

Cook's Call:
Potentially Competitive. Shows' 1998 victory here was the first positive thing to happen for Democrats in the South in quite a while. While this conservative, Republican-leaning district is not easy for any Democrat to hold onto, Shows' conservative voting record and down-home, good-old-boy style make him a solid fit for this mostly rural district. He will be tough to beat in 2000.

The People:

• Pop. 1990: 513,715
• 47.3% rural; 13.7% age 65+;
• 58.8% White, 40.7% Black, 0.3% Asian, 0.1% Amer. Indian, 0.4% Hispanic origin; 0.1% Other.
• Households: 52.5% married couple families; 26.5% married couple fams. w. children; 41.5% college educ.; median household income: $20,234; per capita income: $10,411; median gross rent: $243; median house value: $47,900.

1996 Presidential Vote Dole (R) 86,880 (48%) Clinton (D) 83,425 (46%) Perot (I) 9,648 (5%)

1992 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 102,666 (50%) Clinton (D) 84,089 (41%) Perot (I) 16,758 (8%)