A Mississippi Surprise: GOP Sen. Cochran Beats Back Tea Party Champion

There was a good reason for black voters to support the Republican incumbent over his tea party challenger.

Sen. Thad CochranJohn Fitzhugh/MCT/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


It’s RINO season in Mississippi, and whining time for the tea party. In a surprising finish to a bizarre Senate Republican primary contest in the Magnolia State, on Tuesday night Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel, a tea party champion, defied the predictions of pundits and narrowly lost his bid to unseat longtime incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran. Though much of the instant analysis focused on Cochran’s savvy campaign strategy, Chris McDaniel’s defeat was also made possible by the extreme rhetoric of a right-wing talk-radio host named Chris McDaniel.

After winning a close primary last month but by not enough to prevent a runoff election, McDaniel fell short in the GOP rerun. Though this electoral season has seen too much focus on the simplistic is-the-tea-party-dead-or-alive narrative, McDaniel’s defeat is a blow to tea party hopes, and it will fuel the already intense intraparty feud. Before McDaniel made his oddly defiant nonconcession speech on Tuesday night—without mentioning Cochran and suggesting there was a way to contest the results—conservatives on Twitter were steaming mad at the GOP establishment that vanquished McDaniel in part because it persuaded African American voters to put their distaste for the GOP aside and vote for Cochran. Finally, a Republican candidate attracted black support—and the tea partiers were irate.

For the past year, the Cochran-McDaniel race often felt like a Coen brothers script. The contest managed to win the prize for most absurd Senate race in a cycle that featured an insurgent Republican in Kansas who posted X-rays of gunshot victims on his Facebook page and a tea partier in Kentucky who was caught attending a cockfight (and who denied he was there for the cockfighting). In June, a McDaniel supporter and two McDaniel campaign volunteers were arrested in connection with a break-in into the nursing home where Cochran’s wife lives. This dirty trick seemed to be part of an elaborate plot to reveal that the senator was having an affair with an aide. And a Cochran campaign staffer was fired after defacing McDaniel campaign signs. With the race seemingly locked up for McDaniel prior to the runoff (if you believed the polling), the tea party favorite—who campaigned with a kooky anti-Obama conspiracy theorist—took to Facebook to taunt his opponent’s daughter. Maybe that wasn’t the best move.

McDaniel entered the race against Cochran last fall with the support of the big-money tea party outfits, such as the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund. He tapped into right-wing dissatisfaction with Cochran, who had brought billions of dollars in funding to the state since winning the seat in 1978. After the first primary, Cochran sought to counter the tea party assault by encouraging black voters to support him in the runoff. That move—soliciting crucial support from a Democratic voting bloc—further irked conservatives. Mississippi law prohibits voters from participating in a primary unless they plan to support the nominee—an unenforceable provision in a nation of secret balloting. McDaniel allies talked about sending in poll watchers, only, they said, to determine nothing fishy was going on. And on the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, Mississippi was once again embroiled in a controversy over black voting.

Team McDaniel’s tactics seemed to bolster Cochran’s outreach strategy. “The tea party intends to prevent blacks from voting on Tuesday,” read one mailer distributed in black neighborhoods. It noted that McDaniel had once hosted a controversial radio show and had voted against a civil rights museum. “Mississippians cannot and will not be intimidated to the bygone era of intimidating black Mississippians from voting,” this campaign flyer declared.

The mailer asserted that McDaniel “made racist comments on his radio show.” It was a point Cochran’s campaign had been hammering for months, seemingly without affecting a sufficient number of white Republican primary voters. As a right-wing radio host in the 2000s, McDaniel had blamed hip-hop for gun violence. He had mocked poor blacks for craving “big screen plasma TV’s, Randy Moss jerseys, Air Jordan sneakers, or any type of ‘bling-bling.'” He had decried discussion of reparations for slavery—pledging to move to Mexico, if such a law were ever passed. He also had spoken at events held by a neo-Confederate group that bashed Abraham Lincoln and celebrated secession. His incendiary comments, some of which were first reported by Mother Jones, gave Cochran a bona fide reason to ask African American voters, who comprise 36 percent of the state’s electorate, to keep McDaniel far from Washington’s halls of power.

After the votes were counted on election night—and McDaniel had lost by 1.6 points—the tea party insurgent showed no signs of surrendering. “We have to be absolutely certain that Republican primary was won by Republican voters,” he told his supporters. “There is something a bit unusual about a Republican primary decided by liberal Democrats.” Guess which voters he was referring to. His race may be done, but the fight is not over.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate