In the age of big money and super PACs, winning a major party's nomination for governor without spending any money seems unfathomable.
Yet that's exactly what Robert Gray did last night. The 46-year-old, self-employed truck driver from Jackson spent no money and barely campaigned despite technically running for governor of Mississippi. Gray won 51 percent of the Democratic primary vote anyway, besting attorney Vicki Slater and physician Valerie Adream Smartt Short.
Gray didn't even vote for himself, though it didn't hurt his 60,000-vote margin much. He told the Associated Press that he was too busy.
"I mean, I didn't really do too much campaigning," Gray told National Journal. "I would go to a couple of places and, you know, that's 20 or 30 people, and I decided then that it wasn't — there was a lot of time that wasn't being used pretty well. I know my two opponents, they campaigned real, very hard. But still they wasn't getting to the mass majority of people."
It's impossible to know exactly what prompted Gray's victory, but he may have had two key advantages: His last name — Gray was listed first alphabetically on Democratic primary ballots, according to a sample ballot — and his first name. Some studies have shown bias against female candidates when matched up against male opponents.
