Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is campaigning in a runoff against Democrat Mike Espy on Nov. 27. | AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis Elections Walmart seeks refund from Hyde-Smith after 'public hanging' comment Several other companies have asked the Republican senator for their campaign contributions back. 
 
 Walmart wants its money back from Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. 
 
 The retail behemoth asked Hyde-Smith to return its campaign contribution after the Mississippi Republican praised a supporter by saying, "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row." Hyde-Smith said the statement was made in jest and denied any racial connotation. 
 
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 Walmart responded to a tweet from actress Debra Messing pointing out that the company had donated to Hyde-Smith. "Completely understand your concern," Walmart tweeted from its official company account. "Sen. Hyde Smith's recent comments clearly do not reflect the values of our company and associates. As a result, we are withdrawing our support and requesting a refund of all campaign donations." The company gave $2,000 to the senator. 
 
 Walmart is the latest of several major companies to request refunds from Hyde-Smith's campaign following the controversy over her remarks. She has not apologized for the "public hanging" comment, which she called an "exaggerated expression of regard." 
 
 Hyde-Smith is campaigning in a runoff against Democrat Mike Espy on Nov. 27. A spokesman for her campaign declined to comment. 
 
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 Railroad giant Union Pacific and Boston Scientific, a medical device manufacturer, also asked for their campaign donations to be returned. Both companies sent out dozens of replies on Twitter to users who were criticizing them for the donations. 
 
 "Union Pacific in no way, shape or form condones or supports divisive or perceived to be divisive statements," the company tweeted. "Our contribution was mailed prior to Hyde-Smith's statement being made public. Union Pacific has requested a refund of our contribution." 
 
 "We were not aware of Senator Hyde-Smith’s remarks when this contribution was made on November 8, and we have requested a refund," Boston Scientific tweeted. "We reject the Senator’s statements, which are not aligned with our company’s core values." ||||| Thought you were done with election season? Not so fast. On Tuesday in Mississippi, the final U.S. senator of the 116th Congress will be chosen, determining whether Republicans have 52 or 53 seats come January. It’s the second round of voting in the special election that was scheduled after Republican Sen. Thad Cochran resigned in April. We’re not forecasting this runoff, but nonpartisan handicappers rate the Republican as the favorite. Catch up on everything you need to know about the election below, then join us back here on Tuesday night for our live blog. 
 
 1. The players 
 
 Although the special election is nominally nonpartisan, the battle lines are clear. The Republican candidate is incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, the former state agriculture and commerce commissioner who was appointed to Cochran’s seat in March. The Democratic candidate is Mike Espy, former President Bill Clinton’s secretary of agriculture and a former six-year congressman from Mississippi. 
 
 National Republicans have mobilized on behalf of Hyde-Smith in recent weeks, though it’s not clear if they are genuinely concerned or simply taking no chances. President Trump is hosting not one, but two rallies for her on Monday, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Senate Leadership Fund are reportedly spending more than $1 million each on ads. Democrats have responded in kind, if not proportionally: Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have stumped for Espy, and the liberal Senate Majority PAC has made a $500,000 TV buy. 
 
 But both candidates have baggage. Republicans have focused their ads on Espy’s 1997 indictment for accepting improper gifts when he worked in the Clinton administration (although he was acquitted on all counts in 1998) and his more recent lobbying work for a dictator accused of crimes against humanity. And Hyde-Smith has come under fire for a series of controversies, mostly about her relationship with Mississippi’s Confederate and Jim Crow past. Most notably, she praised a close supporter by saying, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Many saw racial undertones to the quip given that Espy is black and that Mississippi has a long history of lynchings. As a result, corporations like Walmart and Major League Baseball have asked for refunds of their donations to Hyde-Smith’s campaign, but it is far from certain how much the controversies will matter to Hyde-Smith’s (mostly white) Mississippi base. 
 
 2. The partisanship 
 
 The first round of voting on Nov. 6 was a jungle primary in which all candidates, regardless of party, appeared on the ballot. Hyde-Smith finished first with 41.3 percent, followed by Espy at 40.9 percent. A second Republican candidate, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, received 16.4 percent, and a second Democrat, former intelligence officer Tobey Bartee, received 1.5 percent. The race is now headed to a runoff between the top two finishers because no candidate got over 50 percent of the vote. 
 
 The near-tie in Round 1 might make the runoff look like anyone’s ballgame, but it’s not. It’s pretty easy for a Democrat to crest 40 percent of the vote in Mississippi — it’s happened in each of the last three presidential elections. That’s because Mississippi has a higher percentage of black residents than any other state — more than 36 percent of the citizen voting age population — and they vote strongly Democratic. But it’s much harder for a Democrat to get those extra 10 points to reach a majority, because the state’s white voters are almost as strongly Republican, and there are relatively few swing voters. Thus, Mississippi is one of the least elastic states in the country — in other words, a perennial 60-40 red state, just like it was in the first round of the special Senate election (in aggregate, Republican candidates got 57.7 percent and Democratic candidates got 42.3 percent). 
 
 So Espy is probably pinning his hopes on the possibility that the Nov. 27 electorate looks different from the Nov. 6 electorate. Indeed, it seems as if he is specifically trying to translate Hyde-Smith’s “public hanging” comment into outsized African-American turnout on Tuesday. That would be a shift from the first round, when voter turnout in the state didn’t disproportionately lean Democratic — the 15.6-point aggregate Republican lead from Nov. 6 practically matched Mississippi’s FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+15.4. But an irregularly timed special election like Tuesday’s is susceptible to weirder turnout scenarios whereby one party could vastly outnumber the other because of an enthusiasm gap. For example, maybe Republicans who voted for McDaniel on Nov. 6 won’t turn out for Hyde-Smith in the same numbers. If that happens, it would fit in with a trend of Democratic overperformance in other oddly timed special elections in 2017-2018, in which Democrats outperformed their constituencies’ base partisanship by an average of 16 percentage points. That type of overperformance would give Espy a chance. 
 
 However, there are plenty of reasons to think that won’t happen too. Maybe Democratic enthusiasm has been defused now that the party has succeeded at flipping the House. Or maybe Mississippi’s inelasticity will just prevent Democratic overperformance from reaching those lofty heights. 
 
 3. The polling 
 
 Indeed, November’s only public poll of the runoff suggests that Espy will outperform the average Democrat, but not by enough to win. A survey conducted between Nov. 19 and 24 found Hyde-Smith leading Espy 54 percent to 44 percent; the poll was sponsored by a Republican-leaning blog but jointly conducted by one Democratic and one Republican pollster. The most recent independent poll was conducted by Marist College in mid-October, back when the runoff was purely hypothetical; it found Hyde-Smith leading Espy 50 percent to 36 percent. So it’s possible that the race has narrowed in the past month, but probably not by enough to matter. The New York Times did report on a private Republican poll that purportedly showed Espy coming within 5 points of Hyde-Smith in mid-November, but we are always leery of trusting internal polls. 
 
 In the end, there’s not a lot of evidence that Hyde-Smith’s gaffes have thrown this race wide open. (Comparisons to Roy Moore in next-door Alabama seem overblown; it took a scandal of epic proportions to throw that special election to Democrats.) On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that Mississippi is an intractably red state. We’ll find out for sure on Tuesday night; polls close at 8 p.m. Eastern. ||||| Around the time that inflammatory comments by Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi invoking public hangings surfaced on video, Major League Baseball donated $5,000 to her campaign. 
 
 After word of the donation — the maximum legal amount — broke over the weekend, M.L.B. asked for the money back. 
 
 The contribution, first reported Saturday by Popular Information, is embarrassing to M.L.B., which has several initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion in its sport. Many of Hyde-Smith’s comments, some of which she has apologized for or attempted to explain, appear to contradict baseball’s mission. 
 
 “The contribution was made in connection with an event that M.L.B. lobbyists were asked to attend,” an M.L.B. spokesman said in a statement. “M.L.B. has requested that the donation be returned.”
– Major League Baseball no longer wants to play ball with the Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith campaign. The league, which made a $5,000 donation to the Republican's US Senate campaign in Mississippi, asked for it back after it was publicized by the Popular Information blog, reports the New York Times. "The contribution was made in connection with an event that MLB lobbyists were asked to attend," a league spokesman said in a statement, adding that MLB has asked for the donation—which was of the maximum legal amount—to be returned. Hyde-Smith's campaign reported the MLB donation on Nov. 23, well after her controversial joke about a public hanging made the news, though the league says it was made earlier. Walmart, Union Pacific, and other corporate donors have also asked the campaign to return their donations. Polls show that Democratic rival Mike Espy has narrowed Hyde-Smith's lead and is gaining momentum, though the Republican is still expected to win Tuesday's runoff election. President Trump is planning to appear at two Hyde-Smith rallies Monday night. "I think Espy supporters are probably a little more energized than Hyde-Smith," former RNC committeeman Henry Barbour tells Politico. "But I do think conservative voters realize this race is going to decide if we have a conservative or liberal representing us in Washington and that is very motivating to conservative voters." (Hyde-Smith went to a "segregation academy" in the 1970s.)