[erimir]

They will be holding a "jungle primary", where all candidates run and the top two advance to a run-off, unless one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote. That first round will be held concurrently with the regular November election, so the runoff will be in December.

Additionally, they won't be listing party affiliation.

Seems unlikely we'd be able to win the seat, but there are three scenarios where it's possible:

1. The more likely scenario is that the GOP has a bad candidate advance in the runoff, and the Democrat is good enough to beat him. This is like the Roy Moore scenario, pre-molestation accusations. Moore was known for being an extremist even in Alabama. So the Alabama race was unusually close even before those revelations.

Of course, if we're really lucky, the GOP candidate implodes the way that Moore did, which given that MS isn't as Republican-leaning as Alabama, would probably make a victory easier.

The GOP already has a likely candidate that's being talked about as someone who could manage to lose to the Democrats. He's currently trying to primary the incumbent in the other seat. He maybe doesn't want to seem to eager to switch races, but honestly, the special election is a much better opportunity for him since his chances of advancing to the runoff would be pretty good while his chances of beating Wicker are much less so.

2. The much less likely scenario is that the GOP field is hopelessly fractured and Democrats have two decent candidates, and they both advance to the runoff. This is unlikely to happen as it requires pretty narrow ranges of vote splits, but this sort of thing does occasionally happen. We picked up a seat in the Georgia state legislature this way, one that might've been difficult to win in a Dem-GOP runoff. A high profile federal senate race is far less likely to have the same coordination issues from the GOP, but this is the party that fought over who would get to face Trump one-on-one until it was too late and Trump had already won.

3. The extremely unlikely scenario is that a Democrat wins the first round outright, getting 50+% of the vote. This is harder to pull off since even if one Republican implodes, the others will probably pick up the slack. We'd probably need a truly amazing candidate without any significant Democrat competitors, and/or a whole pack of Roy Moores.