JACKSON, Miss.—Mississippi will thrive no matter who is the president, former U.S. House Rep. Gregg Harper, a Mississippi Republican, said at a Stennis Institute Press Forum earlier this month.
“I think Mississippi does well no matter who the president is,” he said at Hal and Mal’s in Jackson, Miss., on Aug. 12. “Part of that is we have an outstanding federal delegation that cares about what happens in Mississippi and they go to bat for us, and I would say that’s across party lines.”
At the forum, Harper was joined by former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy, a Democrat who served in the Clinton administration. In 1986, Espy became the first Black member of Congress elected from Mississippi since Reconstruction; he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2018 and 2020.
Though Harper, who served in Congress from 2009 to 2019, did not specify between former Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, Espy did. A Harris administration would “lift up lower-income people into the middle class” and help strengthen Mississippi, he said.
“If Mississippi’s a chain, we have to make the weaker link stronger,” the Democrat said. “These are the low-income Mississippians, the ones whose hospitals are closing, the ones that are without Medicaid expansion, the ones without health care, the ones whose bridges are fallen, the ones who don’t have minimum wage. The capital that they have, they need someone at the presidential level to aspire to some degree of status and wealth.”
Espy Defends Biden-Harris Immigration Record
During the forum, Harper claimed that between nine and 11 million undocumented immigrants are currently living in the U.S. The Pew Research Center says that the number of undocumented people living in the U.S. increased from 10.2 million in 2019 to 11 million in 2022. But that’s fewer than the 12.2 million undocumented immigrants that resided in the U.S. in the 2007 peak under President George W. Bush.
Espy pointed out that Democrats and Republicans in Congress had written a bipartisan border security bill but Trump tanked the effort, telling Republicans not to vote for it for fear it would take immigration away from him as a campaign issue; the bill died in May.
“I think (Harris) will be successful in saying that we tried to do something, there was a solution on the table, and Donald Trump stopped it,” the Democratic former agriculture secretary said.
Harris called it “the strongest border bill in decades” at the Democratic National Convention last week. She said she would bring back the border security bill as president if elected and sign it into law.
“We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border,” she said on Aug. 22.
Trump has called for a “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants if elected president, prompting many of his supporters to hold “mass deportation now” signs at his campaign rallies.
“To keep our families safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” the former president said at a June campaign rally in Racine, Wis.
Harper: Republicans Shouldn’t Run From Abortion
During the forum, former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy said women are going to rally to Vice President Kamala Harris because “she’s been a champion for reproductive rights all around the country.”
Harris warned voters at the Democratic National Convention that Trump wants to take away reproductive rights and she questioned why he and his supporters “don’t trust women.”
“And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.
Trump vowed in 2016 to appoint U.S. Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade and to allow states like Mississippi to ban abortions. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling that overturned Roe, he bragged that his appointments of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh achieved just that.
“After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump wrote in a social media post in May.
During the 2024 campaign, though, Trump has at times shied away from his heavily anti-abortion record, even trying to claim on Truth Social on Aug. 23 that in a second term, his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
But during the Aug. 12 forum, Harper said Republicans do not need to shy away from the abortion discussion.
“You should be able to defend the value of human life and show that there is something there,” he said.
The former congressman pointed to a report from the Guttmacher Institute that said over one million abortions happened in 2023—the highest number in over a decade despite rampant abortion restrictions across the country. He claimed Democrats were running on two issues: hate for former president Donald Trump and abortion.
“Trump will prevail if—it’s a big if—if he can just act presidential for a couple of months. Don’t be calling people names, don’t be having battles where you don’t have to have battles,” Harper said.
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