A Mississippi Democrat running to replace retired GOP Sen. Thad Cochran will abandon his bid in an effort to unify the party behind former Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy, NBC News has learned. 

Tupelo Mayor Jason Shelton is expected to announce his departure from the U.S. Senate race on Tuesday afternoon. The decision means Espy, who in 1986 became the first black congressman to represent Mississippi in Congress since Reconstruction, will be the only Democrat appearing on the ballot in the general election contest.

State and national Democrats hope Espy is able to mirror Democrat Doug Jones’ upset victory last December in neighboring Alabama.

“I think being the lone Democrat while the two Republicans are beating each other up, there’s big advantage in that,” Joe Trippi, Espy’s media strategist who served in the same role for Jones’ campaign, told NBC News last month. “Jones basically didn’t have a primary of great consequence, and there was great advantage to that. We were able to focus on the positive while they were negative. That’s fundamentally the big advantage of someone being the lone Democrat running.” 

Some Democrats in the state are hopeful Espy could win outright on Nov. 8, eclipsing the 50 percent threshold to avoid sending the race to a runoff that would take place three weeks later. 

There is no primary for the special election and no party designations will appear on voter ballots, meaning Espy will square off on the same Election Day ballot with both of the two Republican candidates: Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, the former Mississippi Agricultural Commissioner appointed this spring by the state’s governor to fulfill the rest of Cochran’s term, and Chris McDaniel, the former state senator who narrowly lost to Cochran in an insurgency bid in the 2014 election.

Espy met in D.C. last month with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the head of the Democratic Senatorial Committee. Espy also met with Guy Cecil, the current head of Priorities USA. 

Brad Chism is working as Espy’s political consultant and Trippi as its media strategist. The campaign is currently building out its apparatus but is waiting to begin campaign advertisements until after the state’s June 5 primary in which multiple Democrats are vying to take on Republican Sen. Roger Wicker in a parallel race this November.