The 1987 Mississippi gubernatorial election took place on November 3, 1987 to elect the

governor of Mississippi A governor is an administrative leader and head of a polity or political region, ranking under the head of state and in some cases, such as governors-general, as the head of state's official representative. Depending on the type of political r ...

. This is the most recent Mississippi gubernatorial election in which the Democratic candidate received a majority of votes. In January 2000,

Ronnie Musgrove David Ronald Musgrove (born July 29, 1956) is an American lawyer and Democratic politician who served as the 29th Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi from January 16, 1996 to January 11, 2000 and as the 62nd Governor of Mississippi from January ...

was elected by the

Mississippi House of Representatives The Mississippi House of Representatives is the lower house of the Mississippi Legislature, the lawmaking body of the U.S. state of Mississippi. According to the state constitution of 1890, it is to comprise no more than 122 members elected fo ...

after neither he nor Republican Mike Parker received a majority in the 1999 general election.

Democratic primary

No candidate received a majority in the Democratic primary, which featured 7 contenders, so a runoff was held between the top two candidates. The runoff election was won by State Auditor

Ray Mabus Raymond Edwin Mabus Jr. (; born October 11, 1948) is an American politician and lawyer. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 75th United States Secretary of the Navy from 2009 to 2017. Mabus previously served as the State Auditor ...

, who defeated cotton farmer and businessman Mike Sturdivant.

Results

Runoff

Republican primary

Businessman and State Board of Education member Jack Reed won the Republican primary, defeating Doug Lemon.

Results

General election

Campaign

National Republicans considered Mississippi's 1987 gubernatorial contest a major target for them, and they devoted significant financial resources to Jack Reed's campaign. At 39 years of age,

defeated

Tupelo Tupelo , genus ''Nyssa'' , is a small genus of deciduous trees with alternate, simple leaves. It is sometimes included in the subfamily Nyssoideae of the dogwood family, Cornaceae, but is placed by other authorities in the family Nyssaceae. In ...

businessman Reed in the 1987 gubernatorial election by 53% to 47%, becoming the youngest governor in the United States. He won "on a wave of black votes" (black voters made up about 30 percent of the state's registered voters) and lost the white vote "by about 3 to 2" despite support from what a coalition one Democratic state chairman described as "

poor white Poor White is a sociocultural classification used to describe economically disadvantaged Whites in the English-speaking world, especially White Americans with low incomes. In the United States, Poor White (or Poor Whites of the South for ...

s" and

yuppie Yuppie, short for "young urban professional" or "young upwardly-mobile professional", is a term coined in the early 1980s for a young professional person working in a city. The term is first attested in 1980, when it was used as a fairly neu ...

s. Mabus, who ran on the slogan "Mississippi Will Never Be Last Again", was billed as "the face of the

New South New South, New South Democracy or New South Creed is a slogan in the history of the American South first used after the American Civil War. Reformers used it to call for a modernization of society and attitudes, to integrate more fully with the ...

", much like his counterpart in Arkansas at the time,

Bill Clinton William Jefferson Clinton ( né Blythe III; born August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He previously served as governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and agai ...

. Mabus was featured in a 1988 ''

New York Times Magazine ''The New York Times Magazine'' is an American Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times''. It features articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors. ...

'' cover story titled "The Yuppies of Mississippi; How They Took Over the Statehouse".

Results

References

1987 File:1987 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: The MS Herald of Free Enterprise capsizes after leaving the Port of Zeebrugge in Belgium, killing 193; Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashes after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport, k ...

gubernatorial A governor is an politician, administrative leader and head of a polity or Region#Political_regions, political region, ranking under the Head of State, head of state and in some cases, such as governor-general, governors-general, as the head of ...

Mississippi Mississippi () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Miss ...

Mississippi gubernatorial election {{Mississippi-election-stub