November 25, 2018

Major League Baseball Wants Cindy Hyde-Smith to Return its $5,000 Donation

And hundreds are planning to protest when the president comes to rally for her on Monday.

Cindy Hyde-Smith campaigns in Mississippi before the runoff election.Zach Roberts/ZUMA Wire

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Almost two weeks after Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said that if she were invited to a public hanging she would be “in the front row,” Major League Baseball PAC donated $5,000, the legal maximum, to her campaign. Now that news of the donation has emerged, and as Hyde-Smith continues to flounder due to racially charged comments and revelations about her past, MLB wants its cash back.

Hyde-Smith, the Republican who has been serving in the Senate since she was appointed to replace Sen. Thad Cochran earlier this year, is facing Democrat Mike Espy in Tuesday’s runoff election. MLB’s donation was first reported on Saturday by the political newsletter Popular Information. It noted that an FEC report filed on November 24 listed the contribution as having been made on November 23, long after Hyde-Smith’s comment on public hanging created a political firestorm. MLB spokesman Pat Courtney said in a statement to news organizations that “the contribution was made in connection with an event that MLB lobbyists were asked to attend. MLB has requested that the contribution be returned.”

Hyde-Smith’s other lowlights include praising Confederates in legislation, joking about voter suppression as “a great idea,” and attending an all white “segregation academy” in the 1970s. And CNN reported another new revelation about Hyde-Smith’s history on Saturday:

As a state senator in 2007, Hyde-Smith cosponsored a resolution that honored then-92-year-old Effie Lucille Nicholson Pharr, calling her “the last known living ‘Real Daughter’ of the Confederacy living in Mississippi.” Pharr’s father had been a Confederate soldier in Robert E. Lee’s army in the Civil War.
 
The resolution refers to the Civil War as “The War Between the States.” It says her father “fought to defend his homeland and contributed to the rebuilding of the country.” It says that with “great pride,” Mississippi lawmakers “join the Sons of Confederate Veterans” to honor Pharr.

MLB is not alone in wanting a return of their contribution to Hyde-Smith’s campaign. MLB’s PAC joins seven other major corporations that have asked for refunds over the past week. As support for her candidacy begins to wane, there is one vocal supporter trying to breathe life back into her campaign:

The Hill reported on Sunday that hundreds of people are planning to protest when the president comes to rally for Hyde-Smith on Monday. “We can not and will not let Hyde-Smith and Trump’s racist rhetoric go unanswered directly by the people, and we must not allow Hyde-Smith to represent our state any longer,” Mississippi Rising Coalition, the group organizing the protest, wrote on Facebook.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate