Just a reminder folks—it’s election day in much of the country. My wife and I will be voting in our local municipal election this evening, and I would encourage you to do the equivalent in your jurisdiction.
Of course, in some locales, I suppose the advice “vote early and often” still applies.
One set of election results I’ll be interested in seeing are those for the statewide races in Mississippi, where Dickie Scruggs’ war on the insurance industry seems to have colored the statewide races this season.
A few related articles I’ve encountered, for those who might be interested include this National Review article:
[D]emagoguing against insurance companies in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is a theme that all the Democrat candidates in Mississippi have adopted. While the overwhelming majority of claimants have been paid, some homeowners who lacked flood insurance but whose houses were destroyed by flooding have engaged in litigation against insurers in an effort to collect under their general homeowners’ policies, the flood-exclusion language be damned.
Leading this massive legal charge is none other than Pascagoula lawyer Dickie Scruggs, who led the negotiations for the states when they sued the tobacco companies and netted a cool billion in the process. In his handling of the Katrina cases, Scruggs’s behavior has been so aggressive that it has drawn the ire of federal judges and prosecutors; the feds have accused him of criminal contempt.
The Clarion Ledger on Sunday reported on Scruggs’ involvement in the Insurance Commissioner race:
Oxford lawyer Dickie Scruggs is funding a new attack ad on Republican insurance commissioner hopeful Mike Chaney.[...]
It’s unclear how Scruggs’ involvement could affect the outcome of the race between Chaney and Anderson on Tuesday, but some attribute the attorney with helping bring down George Dale, the longest- serving insurance commissioner in the nation.
“I am concerned that we are going from bad to worse with Mike Chaney,” Scruggs said. “He’s going to be insurance-friendly, at least to the extent George Dale was.”
Apparently Scruggs hasn’t been able to win over the editorial staff at the Sun Herald:
Mike Chaney has the best approach to solving Mississippi’s insurance crisis as the state’s next commissioner of insurance.[...]
Having defeated the long-time incumbent, George Dale, in the Democratic Primary, Anderson has been unwilling to take his campaign to the next level. He has not engaged Chaney in a constructive dialogue that would have produced the informative campaign we had hoped for and that voters deserved.
While Chaney has focused on policy, Anderson has been unable or unwilling to move past personality, going so far as to try to portray Chaney as a clone of the defeated incumbent Dale. Even for Yellow Dog Democrats, that hound won’t hunt.
It will be interesting watching result numbers come in tonight, I think.