The Steady Hands and a Stubborn Campaign Manager behind Mississippi’s Most Unlikely Victory

A Second Story behind the Headlines

At 10 p.m., four hours after the last polls shuttered and the counting slowed, United Press International and The Associated Press put the final dot on the headline: William A. Allain had won despite trailing in the polls. Under the glare of cameras and the careful cadence of rhetoric, the Attorney General walked to the microphone and thanked a state that had, in a tight, strange season, placed its trust in him. 

He spoke, charmed and cautious, of a boyhood in Washington, Mississippi, of the humbling of ambition and the strange comfort of victory. The wire services dutifully fed that speech into presses across the country, and the pictures ran in every paper that night.

The headlines faithfully recorded the speech, the margin, and the firsts. However, it missed a second story, the one that lived under clipboards and in trunks of station wagons, the one made of long days and late calls. 

What they did not capture were the small, uncredited hands steadying the machinery behind the moment. And among them, a twenty-six-year-old named Derek Bryson Park.