Mr. Presley, 45, is considered one of three elected members of the state Public Service Fee, which regulates utilities, and is the previous mayor of Nettleton, a small city within the bright-red northeast part of Mississippi. He talks energetically about the necessity to develop Medicaid and save rural hospitals, and why it’s essential to get rid of the extraordinarily regressive state grocery tax, and would fairly talk about the lives of poor households than his family ties to a sure in style singer of the identical final title from Tupelo, up the street from Nettleton. (Elvis was his second cousin.)
His only tactic is his unrelenting assault on Mr. Reeves and the welfare scandal that has swirled round him and the earlier Republican governor, Phil Bryant. A 2020 state audit discovered that as a lot as $94 million in federal anti-poverty cash was improperly diverted to 2 nonprofit teams that used it for favors to lobbyists, celebrities and a few lawmakers. The celebrities included Brett Favre, the previous N.F.L. quarterback, who, based on textual content messages uncovered by the nonprofit information web site Mississippi At this time, organized to spend $5 million in welfare funds for a volleyball stadium on the College of Southern Mississippi, his alma mater. On the similar time, the state was rejecting a big majority of requests from households for Mississippi’s meager $170 a month in welfare funds.
Mr. Reeves was lieutenant governor when all this was occurring, and several other individuals on the middle of the scandal have been his mates and supporters. Final summer season, his administration fired the lawyer who had been formally assigned to analyze the scandal and recoup the cash, after the lawyer issued a subpoena to the college’s athletic basis relating to the volleyball cash. Although Mr. Reeves hasn’t been implicated within the diversion of a lot of the cash, Mississippi At this time printed textual content messages in August displaying that the previous state welfare director, who pleaded responsible to federal and state fraud and theft expenses final fall, stated he was appearing on behalf of Mr. Reeves when he siphoned $1.3 million of the welfare cash to a health program run by the governor’s longtime private coach, Paul LaCoste.
That was all Mr. Presley wanted.
“I obtained on this after I noticed, as all Mississippi did, hundreds of thousands of {dollars} aimed toward working households obtained diverted by Tate Reeves and his cronies,” he advised me final week. “His personal private coach, who taught Tate Reeves easy methods to do leaping jacks, obtained a $70,000 car and was paid $11,000 a month, whereas we’ve obtained youngsters going hungry in Mississippi. Effectively, it made me wish to puke.”
Mr. Presley is humorous and garrulous and is commonly described as the most effective pure politician within the state, with an easygoing method that appeals to voters of all kinds. He grew up because the son of a low-income single mom and speaks with actual empathy in regards to the tens of 1000’s of poor households, Black and white, who can’t get clear ingesting water, correct well being care or broadband web after many years of largely racist neglect by the state.
