Yesterday as I was watching Mississippi State play Arizona in football, Tate Reeves ads slamming Brandon Presley about teenage gender identity medicine came on during nearly every commercial break. It got old after the 15th one.

I live in Mississippi where we are solidly in the bottom tier in almost every meaningful socioeconomic metric amongst the rest of the states and even below a couple underdeveloped nations.

One of Tate’s ads has a teacher praising him for raising teacher salaries along with how the state had the largest increase in 4th grade test scores in the country. First, that pay raise happened in spite of Tate more than because of him, and next, a friend who works in education at the state level told me that the test increase had nothing to do with anything Tate did. Also, those miraculous test score increases were undetectable by the time those kids reach 8th grade.

Back to where I was headed… Why is gender identity medicine an issue in this election? I’m not debating whether or not the restrictions put in place are good or bad, but when we have pervasive poverty, lack of healthcare access both because people can’t afford it and because hospitals are closing rapidly in rural areas of the state, and there are substantial education deficiencies, why has gender identity been at the forefront of election issues this year? How many people does that actually affect? Half a percent of the population? I’m willing to bet it’s substantially lower than that, even.

I suppose Tate is scared to run on issues that actually affect people because he’s been ineffective in improving the state in those areas. He’s been amazingly effective at fighting to maintain the status quo, though.

I won’t mention his meddling in the investigation into the most massive welfare fraud in the state’s history by firing the investigator when he started sniffing around republican officials’ involvement.

But, I’m sure he will get 4 more years in the governor’s mansion because he’s a republican, and evangelical religion is knotted up tight with the party.

Nothing to see here. Move along…