This devils have no shame. Vote for me because my hood is less pointy!
source: The Guardian
Thad Cochran courting black Democrats to rescue GOP in Mississippi
In closing stages of Mississippi race, establishment Republicans seeking black voters to avoid another GOP defeat by Tea Party
<figure class="element element-image" data-media-id="gu-fc-5115a855-be43-48e3-8543-8c70021c4d80">
<figcaption>After the embarrassing defeat in the first round of voting, Cochran’s strategists calculated their best option was to appeal to a broader base of voters. </figcaption> </figure> Democratic-leaning black voters in Mississippi are being asked to rescue the Republican establishment from another defeat by the Tea Party on Tuesday, in the final chapter of one of the most bizarre races of the Senate primary season.
The Mississippi Republican primary was forced into a run-off earlier this month after Chris McDaniel, a former talk radio host and Tea Party conservative, narrowly triumphed over Thad Cochran, the incumbent senator who has occupied the same seat for four decades.
In the closing stages of the Mississippi race, 76-year-old Cochran, the epitome of a southern, Republican appropriator, has taken the unusual step of courting the votes of African Americans, who constitute 37% of the state’s population.
Under Mississippi rules, all voters, regardless of affiliation, are permitted to vote in the GOP primary, as long as they did not also cast a vote in the parallel Democratic primary. After the embarrassing defeat in the first round of voting, Cochran’s strategists calculated that their best option was to appeal to a broader base of voters, including those who do not usually support the party.
Cochran who has been joined on the campaign trail by Arizona senator John McCain – considered a moderate in Republican circles – has tacked to the left in the three-week campaign, emphasising the benefits of federal spending he has been instrumental in securing for Mississippi.
During the last round of voting, both McDaniel and Cochran achieved about 49% of the vote, just short of the 50% threshold required to win outright. However, some political analysts have argued that McDaniel has the advantage of a more motivated conservative base, and the momentum from having forced Cochran in the run-off.
The race for the Republican nomination in Mississippi, already among the most closely watched Senate primaries, has gained new significance in the wake of the shock primary defeat of Eric Cantor, who was forced to stand down from his role as Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives.
Cantor’s stunning defeat underscored the enduring influence of rightwing factions within the GOP, and prompted a frenzied week of power-jockeying in the House, with a significant gain for conservatives in the party’s leadership.
The Mississippi contest is being cast as another litmus test of the strength of the Tea Party movement, which prior to this month had experienced a series of setbacks in other high-profile Senate races, including in Georgia, Kentucky and North Carolina.
Cantor’s primary opponent in Virginia’s seventh congressional district, a professor named David Brat, was not backed by any of the national Tea Party organisations.
By contrast, McDaniel, 41, has the full backing of conservative political groups such as Club for Growth, Citizens United and the Tea Party Patriots, who months ago identified Mississippi as the race where they could secure the most high-profile win.
Cochran, facing the most serious primary challenge since he was first elected in 1978, has in turn attracted the support of business interests in the state and the Republican Party establishment, which is dreading another defeat. As such, the race has become a proxy battle in the five-year internal war that has divided the GOP and dragged the party rightwards.
The decision to seek the support of African Americans in Mississippi – where politics are deeply racially segregated and black voters rarely take part in Republican primaries – reveals the desperation of Cochran’s campaign and the difficulty it has in relying on his previous network of supporters to overcome the insurgent candidate.
Cochran is airing TV ads featuring the candidate interacting with black voters, and targeting some African Americans parts of Jackson and the Delta region.
<figure class="element element-image" data-media-id="gu-fc-d8ed33b2-2a19-4bbd-b1d1-680db84c94a9">
<figcaption>Chris McDaniel greets a supporter outside of Jean's Restaurant in Meridian, Mississippi. Photograph: Justin Sullivan /Getty</figcaption> </figure> There is concern that could lead to racially-toned voter intimidation at the polls after the Senate Conservatives Fund, another rightwing backer of McDaniel, said it was joining other groups in a "voter integrity project" to monitor the polls and ensure Democrats who cast a ballot in their party's primary do not cross over.
However, one senior GOP source closely involved in campaigning for the veteran senator said his courting of black voters had been overstated, with the focus instead on a broader push to increase turnout.
The main targets are Republican rank-and-file voters who sat out the first round of voting but could be motivated to attend the ballot by “the shock factor” of McDaniel’s success, the source said.
“The persuasion efforts are over. I think since 6pm on Friday this has all been about mobilisation,” the source said, adding that the Cochran strategy had effectively been to “expand the political geography” in the primary.
Cochran’s allies believe that McDaniel’s loyal support is probably capped around the roughly 155,000 votes he secured in the first round, meaning he could struggle if turnout is higher. They point to encouraging signs from absentee ballot data released on Monday that indicated a high turnout in run-off in counties likely to support Cochran, and lower forecast turnout for McDaniel.
Political forecasting is notoriously unreliable ahead of primary votes – Cantor’s in-house pollsters, for example, predicted the majority leader was streaks ahead prior to his colossal defeat to Brat earlier this month.
Still, Brian Chism, a Democratic pollster who was judged the most accurate forecaster of the first round of voting in Mississippi, has found McDaniel goes into the race with a 52-44 point lead over Cochran among Republican primary voters. However, Chism stresses that his polling does not measure potential crossover from Democratic voters seeking to influence the outcome.
Another unpredictable factor, Chism said, was the possibility that rank-and-file Republicans could abandon Cochran in a backlash against the overtures he has made to the state's more progressive voters, including unionised workers. He described the incumbent’s election strategy as a calculated “wholesale pivot” in order to reach out to an untapped electorate.
“He spent $3m bashing everything that Democrats stand for,” he said of Cochran’s strategy in the first part of the primary. “He has spent the last three weeks reminding voters that there is an essential role for the government in their lives, certainly for the less fortunate.”
However, the decision by Democrats contemplating crossing over on Tuesday and participating in the Republican primary is complicated and could backfire. Any effort to back Cochran could actually damage the prospects for Democrats in November.
If McDaniel wins, Democratic strategists believe they will have an outside chance of winning the state in the general election. Their candidate is Travis Childers, a pro-NRA, anti-abortion former congressman from a red Mississippi district. He has the profile that could conceivably win the conservative state in a race against McDaniel, whose extreme views could alienate the business community and more moderate voters.
McDaniel has been plagued by a string of weird events associated with his campaign. Last month four of his supporters were arrested over a plot to smear Cochran by photographing his bedridden wife in the nursing home where she lives and posting the images on the internet.
Earlier this month, on the night of the first round of voting, three McDaniel Tea Party supporters were discovered locked, in the early hours of the morning, inside the courthouse where the votes had been counted. The trio claimed to have been accidentally locked inside and a district attorney said there was no evidence of a crime being committed but the incident has added to the sense that McDaniel supporter base includes fringe, unpredictable elements.
Elsewhere on Tuesday, both Republican and Democratic primaries are being held in Colorado, Maryland, Utah and the Republican stronghold of Oklahoma, where an open seat has led to a tough GOP primary contest between James Lankford, a congressman, and a Tea Party-backed former speak of the statehouse, TW Shannon. Tuesday also sees primaries in New York, among them a tough battle for survival by the flamboyant 84-year-old Democratic congressman, Charles Rangel, who is standing for a 23rd term.
source: The Guardian
Thad Cochran courting black Democrats to rescue GOP in Mississippi
In closing stages of Mississippi race, establishment Republicans seeking black voters to avoid another GOP defeat by Tea Party
<figure class="element element-image" data-media-id="gu-fc-5115a855-be43-48e3-8543-8c70021c4d80">
The Mississippi Republican primary was forced into a run-off earlier this month after Chris McDaniel, a former talk radio host and Tea Party conservative, narrowly triumphed over Thad Cochran, the incumbent senator who has occupied the same seat for four decades.
In the closing stages of the Mississippi race, 76-year-old Cochran, the epitome of a southern, Republican appropriator, has taken the unusual step of courting the votes of African Americans, who constitute 37% of the state’s population.
Under Mississippi rules, all voters, regardless of affiliation, are permitted to vote in the GOP primary, as long as they did not also cast a vote in the parallel Democratic primary. After the embarrassing defeat in the first round of voting, Cochran’s strategists calculated that their best option was to appeal to a broader base of voters, including those who do not usually support the party.
Cochran who has been joined on the campaign trail by Arizona senator John McCain – considered a moderate in Republican circles – has tacked to the left in the three-week campaign, emphasising the benefits of federal spending he has been instrumental in securing for Mississippi.
During the last round of voting, both McDaniel and Cochran achieved about 49% of the vote, just short of the 50% threshold required to win outright. However, some political analysts have argued that McDaniel has the advantage of a more motivated conservative base, and the momentum from having forced Cochran in the run-off.
The race for the Republican nomination in Mississippi, already among the most closely watched Senate primaries, has gained new significance in the wake of the shock primary defeat of Eric Cantor, who was forced to stand down from his role as Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives.
Cantor’s stunning defeat underscored the enduring influence of rightwing factions within the GOP, and prompted a frenzied week of power-jockeying in the House, with a significant gain for conservatives in the party’s leadership.
The Mississippi contest is being cast as another litmus test of the strength of the Tea Party movement, which prior to this month had experienced a series of setbacks in other high-profile Senate races, including in Georgia, Kentucky and North Carolina.
Cantor’s primary opponent in Virginia’s seventh congressional district, a professor named David Brat, was not backed by any of the national Tea Party organisations.
By contrast, McDaniel, 41, has the full backing of conservative political groups such as Club for Growth, Citizens United and the Tea Party Patriots, who months ago identified Mississippi as the race where they could secure the most high-profile win.
Cochran, facing the most serious primary challenge since he was first elected in 1978, has in turn attracted the support of business interests in the state and the Republican Party establishment, which is dreading another defeat. As such, the race has become a proxy battle in the five-year internal war that has divided the GOP and dragged the party rightwards.
The decision to seek the support of African Americans in Mississippi – where politics are deeply racially segregated and black voters rarely take part in Republican primaries – reveals the desperation of Cochran’s campaign and the difficulty it has in relying on his previous network of supporters to overcome the insurgent candidate.
Cochran is airing TV ads featuring the candidate interacting with black voters, and targeting some African Americans parts of Jackson and the Delta region.
<figure class="element element-image" data-media-id="gu-fc-d8ed33b2-2a19-4bbd-b1d1-680db84c94a9">
However, one senior GOP source closely involved in campaigning for the veteran senator said his courting of black voters had been overstated, with the focus instead on a broader push to increase turnout.
The main targets are Republican rank-and-file voters who sat out the first round of voting but could be motivated to attend the ballot by “the shock factor” of McDaniel’s success, the source said.
“The persuasion efforts are over. I think since 6pm on Friday this has all been about mobilisation,” the source said, adding that the Cochran strategy had effectively been to “expand the political geography” in the primary.
Cochran’s allies believe that McDaniel’s loyal support is probably capped around the roughly 155,000 votes he secured in the first round, meaning he could struggle if turnout is higher. They point to encouraging signs from absentee ballot data released on Monday that indicated a high turnout in run-off in counties likely to support Cochran, and lower forecast turnout for McDaniel.
Political forecasting is notoriously unreliable ahead of primary votes – Cantor’s in-house pollsters, for example, predicted the majority leader was streaks ahead prior to his colossal defeat to Brat earlier this month.
Still, Brian Chism, a Democratic pollster who was judged the most accurate forecaster of the first round of voting in Mississippi, has found McDaniel goes into the race with a 52-44 point lead over Cochran among Republican primary voters. However, Chism stresses that his polling does not measure potential crossover from Democratic voters seeking to influence the outcome.
Another unpredictable factor, Chism said, was the possibility that rank-and-file Republicans could abandon Cochran in a backlash against the overtures he has made to the state's more progressive voters, including unionised workers. He described the incumbent’s election strategy as a calculated “wholesale pivot” in order to reach out to an untapped electorate.
“He spent $3m bashing everything that Democrats stand for,” he said of Cochran’s strategy in the first part of the primary. “He has spent the last three weeks reminding voters that there is an essential role for the government in their lives, certainly for the less fortunate.”
However, the decision by Democrats contemplating crossing over on Tuesday and participating in the Republican primary is complicated and could backfire. Any effort to back Cochran could actually damage the prospects for Democrats in November.
If McDaniel wins, Democratic strategists believe they will have an outside chance of winning the state in the general election. Their candidate is Travis Childers, a pro-NRA, anti-abortion former congressman from a red Mississippi district. He has the profile that could conceivably win the conservative state in a race against McDaniel, whose extreme views could alienate the business community and more moderate voters.
McDaniel has been plagued by a string of weird events associated with his campaign. Last month four of his supporters were arrested over a plot to smear Cochran by photographing his bedridden wife in the nursing home where she lives and posting the images on the internet.
Earlier this month, on the night of the first round of voting, three McDaniel Tea Party supporters were discovered locked, in the early hours of the morning, inside the courthouse where the votes had been counted. The trio claimed to have been accidentally locked inside and a district attorney said there was no evidence of a crime being committed but the incident has added to the sense that McDaniel supporter base includes fringe, unpredictable elements.
Elsewhere on Tuesday, both Republican and Democratic primaries are being held in Colorado, Maryland, Utah and the Republican stronghold of Oklahoma, where an open seat has led to a tough GOP primary contest between James Lankford, a congressman, and a Tea Party-backed former speak of the statehouse, TW Shannon. Tuesday also sees primaries in New York, among them a tough battle for survival by the flamboyant 84-year-old Democratic congressman, Charles Rangel, who is standing for a 23rd term.
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