Haley Barbour (R)

A star athlete, valedictorian and student-body president at Yazoo City High School, Barbour received a scholarship to attend the University of Mississippi. In 1968, during Barbour's college years, his brother Jeppy convinced the family to convert from the Democratic Party to the GOP. With Haley's help, Jeppy won election as the first Republican mayor of Yazoo City in the 20th century. Barbour left Ole Miss later that year to work for Richard Nixon's presidential campaign.

Though Barbour came up 6 credits short of completing his undergraduate degree,he was able to enroll in the University of Mississippi School of Law. In 1971, he married his wife Marsha, with whom he later had two sons. Barbour served on the 1972 coordinated campaign that put Mississippi in Nixon's column again and sent future Republican Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran to the U.S. House. After completing his J.D. in 1973, he went on to work at the family law firm.

Party Insider

Barbour moved up the ranks of Republican organizing quickly, running Gerald Ford's 1976 campaign in the Southeast and working on John Connally's (R-Tex.) campaign for president in 1980.

In 1982, Barbour was nominated by Mississippi Republicans to challenge Sen. John C. Stennis, a Democrat who had held the post since 1947. Barbour ran with the slogan "A senator for the '80s," hoping to draw an implicit contrast between himself and his 81-year-old opponent.Though he went on to suffer a resounding 64% to 36% defeat, the 35-year-old's $1 million fundraising haul had raised eyebrows in the party.

After earning a spot on the Republican National Committee in 1984, Barbour was named Ronald Reagan's White House political director in 1985. In 1988, he became an adviser to George H. W. Bush's presidential campaign, and in 1991, he founded the now-formidable lobbying firm of Barbour, Griffith, & Rogers-an undertaking that has been both a boon and a curse to his subsequent political career.

Barbour then served as chair of the RNC from 1993 to 1997, during which time Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1950s. In 1993, Barbour founded an unofficial RNC offshoot-the National Policy Forum-that poll-tested the tenets of what would become the party's "Contract with America." It was that same think tank, however, that put him in political hot water after it was revealed that it had funneled $1.6 million to the RNC from a Hong Kong firm with scant U.S. ties-a move that led the IRS to reject the forum's application for non-profit status.

Gubernatorial Race

In his second run for elective office, Barbour announced in 2003 that he would challenge Democratic incumbent Ronnie Musgrove for the Mississippi governorship. Musgrove, who had been chosen by the state's House of Representatives in 2000 after he failed to win the popular-vote majority required by Mississippi law, was seen as vulnerable entering election year. He was the last of a dying breed of Democratic governors in the deep South, and his sluggish fundraising operations had left emboldened Republicans.

Barbour won an uneventful Republican primary against trial lawyer Mitch Tyner, 83 to 17 percent. Going into the general election, he attacked Musgrove for failing to better manage the state's economy, for resisting tort reform in a state known for large plaintiff awards and for his endorsement of Al Gore in 2000. Musgrove hit back by defending the state's economy as better than most and casting Barbour as an outsider with lobbying ties to pharmaceutical companies and tobacco.At the end of the state's most expensive gubernatorial race in history-Barbour having raised $10.6 million; Musgrove, $8.5 million-Barbour won by a 53% to 46% margin, becoming just the second Republican governor of Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Governorship

Though Barbour entered office with Democratic majorities in both the state House and Senate, he has proven successful at pushing through some of his key agenda items, including spending cuts and tort reform.

The defining experience of Barbour's governorship has been 2005's Hurricane Katrina, which killed over 200 Mississippi residents, destroyed large swaths of the state's infrastructure and led 47 of the state's 82 counties to be declared disaster areas. Barbour was credited with maintaining a calm demeanor in the storm's aftermath, taking advantage of Mississippi's powerful congressional delegation to acquire billions in federal funding for housing and flood insurance claims while declining to significantly criticize the federal government's response.

The state recovered over 30,000 jobs in the year after the storm, and Barbour's approval ratings saw a significant bump.

In 2007, after handily defeating a primary challenger, Barbour won re-election over Democratic attorney John Arthur Eaves by a 58 to 41 percent margin. In November 2008, following the presidential election, Barbour was appointed vice chair of the Republican Governors Association.

Barbour's name was floated both as a possible George W. Bush cabinet appointee in 2004 and, early on, as a possible presidential contender in 2008.

Barbour took over as chair of the Republican Governors Association in June 2009, just minutes after Gov. Sanford stepped down as RGA chair after admitting an affair. As vice-chair of the RGA, Barbour was a natural successor.

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