Republican Civil War Hurtling Towards D Day In Mississippi

Competing with Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity just endorsed this anti-American garbage

June 24 is the date of the next round of exciting primaries. Although we're most interested in seeing if Heather Mizeur can confound the odds and win in Maryland and if Tom Guild can beat a ConservaDem for the Democratic nomination for the open Oklahoma City congressional seat, there are also contests in Colorado, New York, Utah and, of course, the big run-off in Mississippi pitting Dave Brat against Eric Cantor Chris McDaniel against Thad Cochran. Smart money is on McDaniel, more so after the Cantor rhino debacle Tuesday. But it might be too early to totally count poor old Cochran out yet. Cochran may be feeble and too senile to appear in public but Boss Barbour and his machine are still fighting like mad dogs. They think it's all about turning out more easily-manipulated Mississippi voters. That, at best, is a long-shot.

History suggests a vast majority of people won’t bother to vote for this sort of intraparty contest-- no matter how much attention it gets from political insiders or the news media. In presidential general elections, the peak events in American politics, about 6 in 10 of those eligible go to the polls. In midterm Congressional elections, fewer than half do.

Midterm primaries draw fewer than that. In 2010, for example, as the Tea Party wave neared its peak, just one in five showed up for House and Senate primaries.

That roughly matches the proportion of Mississippians participating in last week’s contest. A third candidate drew just enough of the 313,000 votes cast to deny Mr. McDaniel or Mr. Cochran the 50 percent needed for victory.

Odds are that number will drop on June 24. In 168 such cases between 1994 and 2012, a recent study by Fairvote.org found, turnout declined from the primary to the runoff all but six times.

Supposedly, Team Cochran is hoping Democratic voters will save him. That can't be based on his voting record, which is startlingly right-wing. His ProgressivePunch lifetime crucial vote score is 3.63, more extreme than Utah teabagger Mike Lee, Louisiana sex predator David Vitter or Kansas Koch brothers fave Jerry Moran. Why should a Mississippi Democrat try saving Cochran? Because McDaniel is worse? It's nearly impossible to be worse in any way that will matter. Besides, the 84,000 most likely Dems to vote were the ones who voted in the Democratic primary June 3 and they are excluded from the GOP primary a week from Tuesday. So the brain trust behind the Cochran campaign will try even harder, they say.

To inspire them, Mr. Cochran must rely on a sophisticated argument: that Democrats should consider him friendlier to their interests than his Tea Party rival, who if nominated would defeat the Democratic candidate Travis Childers anyway.

“What he has to do is find inert Democrats, who are not habitual voters, and get them to vote in a Republican primary,” said Daron Shaw, a University of Texas political scientist who helped target voters for both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns.

From the point of view of those voters, Mr. Shaw added, the question is “Why? To produce a better Republican candidate?”

Mr. Cochran and groups aligned with him have skilled political operatives led by Henry Barbour’s uncle, the former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour. The elder Mr. Barbour, also a former national Republican Party chairman, cites two factors that make this runoff atypical.

One is that nearly all those who voted in the primary backed the same two candidates pitted in the runoff. Turnout often drops in runoffs because backers of eliminated candidates stay home.

The second involves unauthorized photographs that surfaced last month of Mr. Cochran’s wife, who has dementia, in a nursing home. Authorities arrested four men, one of whom had been a co-host of a radio show with Mr. McDaniel. But Mr. McDaniel accused the incumbent of unfairly blaming him and overcame a late deficit in the polls.

The scandal, Haley Barbour said, had obscured a “transformative” McDaniel vulnerability: An April speech in which he called the federal Department of Education unconstitutional. Eliminating federal school spending would cut 15 percent of Mississippi’s elementary and secondary education budget-- a fact Cochran allies are spreading among parents, teachers and principals to heighten their sense of urgency.

That argument, however, depends on two things: that voters hear it, and that they believe Mr. McDaniel, as a senator, could succeed in wiping out federal education funding.

Conservative groups aligned with Mr. McDaniel bank on the more conventional view that low-turnout contests tilt to the candidate inspiring the most passion-- in this case the 41-year-old Tea Party champion over the 76-year-old Washington institution. That formula worked for David Brat in his upset of Mr. Cantor in Virginia.

The McDaniel forces are also telling GOP voters that Cochran can't defeat McDaniel with Republicans so he's going to try to get Democrats to hijack the election. Their message is savage, but very appealing to hard core, far right Republican extremists:

Cochran knows that if he lets Republicans choose their party's nominee, he will lose. So he's going to continue to do what he started in the primary and try to get Democrats to hijack the Republican election.


It's disgraceful, but not surprising. Liberal Republicans often abandon their party when they're going to lose a primary.

Remember when Arlen Specter became a Democrat when Pat Toomey was going to defeat him in Pennsylvania? Or when Charlie Crist left the party when Marco Rubio was going to defeat him in Florida? Or when Lisa Murkowski ran as a write-in candidate after she lost the primary in Alaska?
 Establishment Republicans are willing to lock arms with the Democrats because they don't believe in our principles. Their ideology is power.


 These politicians are only Republicans because they see the party as a way to get elected, not because they want to enact conservative policies.

We can't let Thad Cochran pretend to be a conservative to get Republican votes while he simultaneously uses his liberal record to get Democrat votes. He can't have it both ways.


We also can't let Democrats pick the Republican nominee. Mississippi Republicans deserve a senator who shares their conservative values and will fight for their freedoms.

That fundraising letter went out from Jim DeMint's old Senate Conservative Fund, the operation that attempts replacing mainstream conservatives with neo-fascists and John Birchers. By some twisted logic it plays into the silly GOP meme that Cantor lost because Democrats were out to get him and voted for Brat. A few may have, but not enough to make any difference, despite the pathetic and desperate bleating of Cantor's probably-soon-to-be-out-of-business pollster, always wrong John McLaughlin. But Brat did best in blood red Hanover County, while Cantor didn't get as badly mauled in the Richmond suburbs. Turnout was high in Republican precincts not in Democratic precincts and, except for McLaughlin's wishful thinking, there's nothing to point to any kind of determinative Democratic impact on the VA-07 race. Nor will there be enough of one to pull Cochran's chestnuts out of the fire on the 24th.