Chances Of A Democrat Replacing Thad Cochran As A Mississippi Senator? Slim, But...

Late Monday Thad Cochran's office announced that the 80 year old Mississippi Republican will resign on April Fools Day, due to rapidly deteriorating health. When Cochran first won his Senate seat in 1978 he was the first Republican to win any statewide seat in the state since Reconstruction. Gov. Phil Bryant will appoint an interim senator and then both seats will be voted on in November. (The winner of the special election to replace Cochran will have to run again in 2020.) Three other factors:

• Bryant is term-limited out of the governor's job
• The other Republican senator, Roger Wicker, is already up for reelection in November.
• The special election is non-partisan (no party affiliations on the ballot-- so a jungle primary like in California.

That last factor means that if a lot of Republicans run but just one Democrat, it is likely a Democrat will be in the runoff. There is already talk about Bryant appointing himself senator. (There are reports that he's already turned down entreaties from McConnell and Trump to do just that.)

Democrats are running for the Wicker seat, and the open seat is expected to attract several candidates from both parties. Democrat Mike Espy, President Bill Clinton’s first agriculture secretary, says he has a “strong intention” to run. [He's running.] In 1986 he became the first African-American in modern times to win a congressional seat in Mississippi.

Cochran’s departure set off a scramble within a state Republican Party already struggling to manage a disaffected conservative faction. Chris McDaniel, the outspoken, tea party-backed state senator who came close to defeating Cochran in a bitter 2014 Republican primary, qualified last week to challenge Wicker but said he might jump to the special election if the Cochran seat is open. McDaniel said Monday it is “premature” to say what he will do.

Republicans in Washington are hoping to prevent a rough and costly primary season as they struggle to defend their 51-49 hold on the Senate. Some Republicans have doubts about McDaniel’s ability to win a general election. And after Republicans’ bruising loss in Alabama last year, party leaders are eager to block any risky candidates.

Cochran has been a sporadic presence on Capitol Hill in recent months. He stayed home for a month last fall, returning to Washington in October to give Republicans the majority they needed to pass a budget plan. He has since kept a low profile and an aide ever present at his side.

...Wicker said Monday he and his campaign haven’t communicated with McDaniel about which seat he’ll seek. Asked if he’s relieved because McDaniel might seek the open seat instead of challenging him, Wicker said, “I don’t know that.” He smiled as he answered the question and told reporters, “I’m smiling because of your persistence.”

The Mississippi race was also being eyed by former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who at one point warned of the challenges to GOP incumbents he felt were insufficiently supportive of President Donald Trump.

That effort may have waned, however. Senate Republicans suffered a stunning setback in December when neighboring Alabama elected a Democratic senator, in a special election, for the first time in a generation. Bannon backed Republican Roy Moore, who was accused of sexual impropriety against young women.

Mississippi’s governor has not released names of people he will consider appointing to temporarily fill Cochran’s seat, though there has been widespread speculation that he might appoint Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves or Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, both Republicans.

Bryant has not said whether he would consider appointing himself to the Senate. He has told some in the GOP that Trump and McConnell have urged to appoint himself, according to one Republican who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss private conversations.

Bryant is limited to two terms as governor, and his time in that job ends in January 2020. Bryant campaigned for Trump in 2016, and has been to Washington many times in the past year to meet with the president.

Other Democrats that may consider running besides Espy include former Attorney General Jim Hood and Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley-- yes, a second cousin. If McDaniel-- a lunatic extremist-- switches from the Cochran race, which is likely, someone like Hood or Presley could give him a run for his money-- especially if the wave is bigger than anyone expects.

Whoever Wins In Mississippi, It Will Be A Victory For The NRA And For Anti-Choice, Anti-Immigrant And Anti-Gay Fanatics

The bitterly divisive Republican Party primary in Kansas has endangered the Republicans’ ability to hold that red, red state’s Senate seat. The Republican Party primary in Mississippi was even more bitter and more divisive. But Thad Cochran, the senile 76 year old incumbent who was first sent to Washington in 1973 (as a congressman) and who has been in the Senate since 1978, is probably going to hold on. He spent almost $6,000,000 in the primary and squeaked by teabagger Chris McDaniel 157,733 to 156,315 in the first round and 194,932 to 187,265 in the runoff.

Two weeks from tomorrow he’ll face off against reactionary Blue Dog Travis Childers, before he was defeated in the Great Blue Dog Apocalypse of 2010, one of the 3 most right-wing Democrats in the House. His platform in this race has basically been to appeal to disenchanted McDaniel supporters by bragging how he voted against Obamacare and reiterating that he’s a big NRA supporter and an opponent of women’s right to Choice, LGBT equality and immigrants. The most recent public poll, released by YouGov for CBS News on October 5, shows Cochran at 46% and Childers at 35% (when you include leaners). That is a loot of undecided voters— but 35% is nothing to write home about. Last time Cochran ran (2008), the Democrat, Erik Fleming, took 39%. In 2012 the other Republican Senator, Roger Wicker, beat Democrat Albert Gore 57-41% and Republican Governor Phil Bryant was elected in 2011 against Democrat Johnny DuPee 61-39%. Even President Obama did better than Childers’ 35%. He took 44% against Mitt Romney.

The DSCC hasn’t gotten involved in Childers’ long-shot bid and national Democratic groups have written the race off. As of the June 30 FEC filing deadline Childers had raised $178,621 and was holding just $34,895 cash-on-hand to Cochran’s $714,290 cash-on-hand. Although over $11 million was spent by outside groups during the primary— the Chamber of Commerce defending Cochran with $1,200,000 and Club for Growth attacking him with $3,140,012 for example— no outside money has been spent by anyone for the general. Childers isn’t getting any money from traditional Democratic sources, although the Blue Dog’s so-called Moderate Democrats PAC gave him $10,000 and conservative Democratic allies like Blue Dog Joe Donnelly ($5,000), Kirsten Gillibrand, a “former” Blue Dog herself, ($5,000), Mark Begich ($5,000), Steny Hoyer ($2,500), and Tom Carper ($2,500) have contributed through their own PACs.

Yesterday’s Clarion-Ledger did a profile of candidate Childers and what they call his “wild card” chance to win: angry teabaggers.

Many McDaniel supporters are spitting mad. They believe Cochran stole the Republican runoff through dirty tricks, race baiting and otherwise urging Democrats to raid the GOP primary.

Many have vowed to vote for Childers, sit out the general election or write in McDaniel (which would spoil their ballots). All of the above would help Childers in what is otherwise a very long shot. He faces a well-funded, six-term incumbent Republican in a very red state.

Will Republican voters really cross over in numbers and vote for the Democrat as they've vowed on social media?

"I take folks at their word," said Democratic Party Chairman Rickey Cole. "If they're committed enough to put it out there on Facebook or Twitter, I believe they will."

Recent polling shows the race has tightened somewhat, with Childers at 35 percent, Cochran stuck below 50, at 46 percent. A large tea party crossover or sit-out could tip the scales.

But Childers has to walk a very fine line. He needs some tea party crossover, but he can't risk losing any Democratic base. Cochran has enjoyed healthy support from Democrats, not just in his runoff hail Mary, but in general elections for most of his career.

Childers is guarded when asked about tea party support.

"I hear from all kinds of folks," Childers said while on his recent Jackson-Morton-Forest trip, mirroring earlier comments. "Since I started my career, I've always had great support from my fellow Democrats. I have always attracted a large independent vote … I have always had some Republican support."

But Childers has made two platform pitches to tea party voters.

At this summer's Neshoba County Fair, he pledged in his stump speech to vote for a balanced budget amendment, saying, "The tea party says we cannot sustain $17 trillion in debt. They're right."

More recently, Childers became the first Democrat to sign the Federation for American Immigration Reform anti-amnesty pledge.

Childers said this was not red meat for the tea party and "not aimed at anybody." But it drew accolades from some tea party leaders. The blowback from Democrats so far has been minimal.

…"I haven't always had the best relationship with Washington," Childers said. "It seemed when I was up there, I never did fall in line. I voted my genuinely held beliefs, what I thought best.

"I was fiscally conservative on money issues," Childers said. "I consider myself a moderate. I never got hung up on labels. I knew what my politics were. I really believe my politics fit the mode of the average Mississippian, and the average working Mississippian."

Childers said he voted against the Affordable Care Act because, "I just thought we could have done so much better." He said health care reform was needed, "because the insurance companies were running health care, and still do, to some extent.”

Childers claims he hasn’t switched to the GOP (yet) because he’s proud to be a Democrat. He favors increasing the minimum wage and attacks Cochran for voting against the Paycheck Fairness Act. Perhaps because he’s such a staunch anti-Choice fanatic, there is no gender gap working in his favor so far. 29% of Mississippi women say they will vote for him and 31% say they will vote for Cochran. With leaners they’re tied at 35-35%.

Equally bad news for Childers, especially in light of the NY Times report yesterday on Black voting, is that Childers isn't inspiring Blacks. Many remember what a conservative he was and don't plan to bother going to the polls to vote for him. Why should they? Only 58% of African-American voters say they’ll vote for him— which compares badly to African American support for other conservative southern Democrats like Mary Ladrieu (76%), Mark Pryor (76%), Michelle Nunn (77%), Kay Hagan (83%), Mark Warner (83%) and Alison Lundergan Grimes (92%).

The confidential memo from a former pollster for President Obama contained a blunt warning for Democrats. Written this month with an eye toward Election Day, it predicted “crushing Democratic losses across the country” if the party did not do more to get black voters to the polls.

“African-American surge voters came out in force in 2008 and 2012, but they are not well positioned to do so again in 2014,” Cornell Belcher, the pollster, wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 1. “In fact, over half aren’t even sure when the midterm elections are taking place.”

...[S]ophisticated targeting, church visits, high-profile surrogates and even direct appeals by the president may go only so far, some Democrats said, when candidates are running away from a politician black voters adore. Ms. Grimes is but one example.

In Louisiana, Ms. Landrieu ran an ad calling the president’s policies “simply wrong when it comes to oil and gas production.” In Georgia, Michelle Nunn, the Democratic Senate nominee, has refused to say if she would have voted for the Affordable Care Act-- Mr. Obama’s signature domestic initiative.

None of this sounds good for Childers. In 2008, while only 11% of wjite Mississippians backed President Obama's election, 98% of Blacks voted for him. Elijah Cummings of Maryland sums it up like this: "People understand that you have to walk a thin line," describing Democratic candidates’ dilemma. "But African-Americans do not want you denying any affiliation with the president, because they love this president. He is like a son to them."

Will The Ugliness Of The GOP Primary In Mississippi Swamp McConnell In Kentucky?

On top of the court case he filed last week to vacate the results of the Mississippi Senate election, Tea Party sore loser Chris McDaniel has been trying to pick a new fight-- this time with poor, embattled Miss McConnell, threatening to turn Kentucky's far right fringe-- which he so desperately needs in his neck-and-neck fight against Alison Lundergan Grimes-- into a pack of stay at home protestors in November. McDaniel is mad at the world-- especially after the state GOP told him to go pound sand last night.

“As Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell has the opportunity to show true leadership in this situation by publicly renouncing the [National Republican Senatorial Committee]'s, Henry Barbour's and his own financial support of race-baiting advertisements that disparaged conservatives in Mississippi and openly engaged in the sordid politics of racial division in order to scare Democrats into participating in a Republican primary,” Fritsch said. And then Fritsch insinuated that all Republican senators who donated to Cochran who don’t ask for a refund are race-baiters:

“Any Republican senator who donated money to the Cochran campaign should immediately demand that that Cochran refund their donation, and refusal to do so is tacit acceptance of the race-baiting tactics employed by the Cochran campaign and Henry Barbour,” Fritsch said.

You see that, senators? Even if you donated to Cochran because you’re his friend, you support his votes or you’re trying to protect an incumbent, you approve of race baiting.

Remember, McDaniel will have to prove that that at least 7,667 votes were illegally cast. McDaniel and his KKK supporters just can't wrap their collective head around the idea of African-Americans voting in the white people party. "We must be absolutely certain," said McDaniel, when he found out Africans Americans were voting, "that our Republican primary was won by Republican voters." The irony here is that the criminality that might wind up being proved was taking place inside the extraordinarily shady McDaniel campaign. According to yesterday's Clarion-Ledger McDaniel staffers were paying people to make false claims about vote rigging.

Stephen Fielder, the self-proclaimed pastor from Meridian, says a member of Chris McDaniel's campaign paid him $2,000 to give an interview in which he accused a Thad Cochran campaign staffer of asking him to pay people to vote for the GOP incumbent.

Attorney General Jim Hood said Wednesday at the Neshoba County Fair that Fielder had told state investigators he was paid to lie about the vote-buying scheme. Fielder told Hood that he was never asked by a Cochran staffer to pay people for their vote. Hood said last week he did not know who actually paid Fielder for the interview.

However, Hood spokeswoman Jan Schaefer confirmed Monday evening that Fielder told investigators that it was Noel Fritsch who paid him for the interview.

Additionally, a Democratic activist said two weeks ago that Fritsch contacted him about helping to find legal representation for Fielder. At the time, it was believed the FBI was talking to Fielder, but that has not been substantiated. The FBI previously would neither confirm nor deny any investigation into Fielder.

In an email statement Tuesday night, Fritsch said, "Charles Johnson paid for the texts & emails Cochran/Wicker staffer Saleem Baird sent that prove Cochran bought Democrat votes." Fritsch did not respond to other questions about whether he helped raise the money used to pay Fielder or about his alleged involvement in securing legal representation for the Meridian man.

This is exactly why Republicans are always accusing normal people of perpetrating election fraud. It's what conservatives always do as a matter of course and they project their own anti-democracy, criminal intentions onto everyone else. The Mississippi election primary has turned into a ridiculous mess that has spiraled further and further out of control, making the whole process look illegitimate. And is it any wonder that demented Republican Congressman Mo Brooks next door in Alabama is claiming the Democratic Party is waging "a war against white people?" These are very sick people.

Chris McDaniel's friendly campaign staff likes playing dress up

Mississippi Senate Debacle-- Who Will Have The Last Laugh?

Right-wing populists-- who are sometimes referred to as teabaggers-- have pretty much taken over the Republican social policy agenda. But have been largely unable to beat Chamber of Commerce Republicans in primaries this year, the way they did manage to do in 2010 and 2012 by replacing longtime Senate incumbents like Bob Bennett (R-UT), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Dick Lugar (R-IN) and beating Establishment candidates in Delaware (Mike Castle), Florida (Charlie Crist), Nevada (Sue Lowden), Colorado (Jane Norton), Texas (David Dewhurst) and Kentucky (Trey Grayson). Although the Tea Party wound up with Ted Cruz (TX), Mike Lee (UT), Marco Rubio (FL) and Rand Paul (KY) in the Senate, the rest of their candidates failed in the general elections that followed. This cycle teabagger candidates lost high profile Senate races in Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Dakota and, most recently, Mississippi. The bitterness of the Mississippi primary is still reverberating and this morning Jonathan Weisman predicted in the NY Times "that if conservative outrage in Mississippi spreads, some Tea Party voters in other states where the Republican establishment’s candidate has prevailed could stay home in November. That could bolster Democrats like Kay Hagan in North Carolina, Mark Pryor in Arkansas, Mark Begich in Alaska or Michelle Nunn in Georgia."

Jane Bilello, chairwoman of the Asheville Tea Party in North Carolina, told him the much-disliked GOP candidate, failed House Speaker Thom Tillis, will suffer Tea Party defections in November. "Oh, we are watching. We are furious. The G.O.P. wants us to sit down, shut up and vote for their RINO. We are putting our foot down, and until the Republicans learn this lesson, they’re going to continue to lose elections."

[T]he open-ended nature of the Mississippi Republican civil war injects an element of uncertainty. By serving a notice of intent to contest the results, Mr. McDaniel will have 10 days from the official certification of Mr. Cochran’s victory to gather evidence and file an appeal. Certification is not expected until next week.

If, as expected, that appeal is filed, the Mississippi Republican Party would almost certainly reject it, sending the matter to the courts. Lawyers involved in the McDaniel case said they would be aiming for a new runoff election by mid-September.

Noel Fritsch, a spokesman for the McDaniel campaign, claims the campaign and its allies have identified 4,900 "irregular" ballots, with 31 counties and 19,000 absentee ballots still to be examined. Mr. Cochran prevailed by 6,693 votes. By checking voter rolls, McDaniel allies can identify Mississippians who voted in the June 3 Democratic primary and match them against names of people who voted in the Republican runoff, although they would be prohibited from voting in both. That will not tell them whether two-time voters cast ballots in the runoff for Mr. McDaniel or Mr. Cochran.

The Cochran campaign calls the McDaniel figures for ineligible voters wildly exaggerated. And while some number of miscast votes might be found, nowhere near enough will be uncovered to change the results, said Austin Barbour, a Cochran campaign adviser.

He pointed to the Eastover precinct in Jackson where the McDaniel camp says 130 disputed ballots have been identified. But only 35 Democrats voted in that precinct on June 3.

"It had always been our hope that after the runoff ended, we could move to the general election," Mr. Barbour said. "We’ve been gracious to Senator McDaniel. Unfortunately, the time has come that we in the Cochran campaign can no longer sit silent about these baseless accusations."

The accusations are not going away.

...Dwayne Hall, vice president of the Miller County Patriots, a Tea Party group in Texarkana, Ark., says he has set up a Google alert for the McDaniel-Cochran fight and emails his network of fellow activists all the news from Mississippi.

“I’m no longer a member of the Republican Party, and I’d expect a lot of my fellow patriots to resign, too,” he said, adding: “I’m perfectly willing to do a protest vote in November if that’s my best option. I’m keeping that option open.”

Adam Brandon, executive vice president of the national Tea Party funder FreedomWorks, said Republican leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky may yet succeed in “smashing” Tea Party groups, but they are doing so at a great cost.

“The way activists feel treated by the party, they may stay home in November, and even if they do vote, I can tell you they’re not going door to door,” he said. “When Mitch McConnell says, ‘We’re going to stamp these guys out and smash them all over the country,’ how are Republicans going to win anywhere?”

It would be pretty funny if teabaggers voted for nominal Democrat, Blue Dog Travis Childers, in November, the same way African-Americans voted for Cochran in the runoff. It would be even funnier when Childers switches parties and becomes a Republican, which is pretty inevitable.

Establishment Republicans May Be Winning The Primaries But The Tea Party Wing Controls The Argument

Louisiana teabagger Steve Scalise isn't the biggest win for the Ted Cruz wing of the GOP

The reaction from ugly Republican racists to the embarrassing Tea Party losses in Oklahoma and Mississippi Tuesday-- two of the most brainwashed and extreme right-wing states in the U.S.-- was, to put it mildly, ungracious. McDaniel, of course, is refusing to concede. Limbaugh was screaming about Uncles Toms on the radio the next day and, as the National Memo pointed out, Palin declared that the Mississippi election had been tampered with, the results were illegitimate and that it is pointless for people like her to support the Republican Party.

"Ruh roh! In order to save an entrenched 42-year member of the good old boys club what kind of 'Scooby snacks' has 'DC' promised to Mississippi Democrats to intervene in the GOP runoff for U.S. Senate?" she asked. When the enticing treat of not having Chris McDaniel as their senator proved too much for Democrats to pass up, Palin was predictably displeased.

"If Republicans are going to act like Democrats, what’s the use in getting all gung ho about getting other Republicans in there?" she pouted to Sean Hannity on Tuesday night.
The next day, she took to her Facebook again to voice her displeasure.

"When an election is questionable, with potential legal violations, politics MUST be put aside and the irregularities MUST be fully investigated. Regardless of party, we owe it to voters and to democracy within our Republic," Palin wrote.

This morning Sheryl Gay Stolberg was reporting from Tennessee that the Ted Cruz wing of that state's GOP is undaunted and ready to triumph over Lamar Alexander and install a lunatic fringe neo-fascist, Joe Carr, as the state's next U.S. senator, despite polling that shows 64% of Tennessee Republicans happy with Alexander. Alexander has the poll numbers, Newt Gingrich and the state Republican Party but Carr has… Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, Jim DeMint and a motley crew of delusional, drug-addicted Hate Talk Radio hosts.

Given that Chris McDaniel, Mr. Cochran’s Tea Party challenger, lost Tuesday, such optimism might seem out of place. But Tea Party conservatives here and in Washington say that, if anything, the close call in Mississippi-- and what appeared to be Mr. Cochran’s reliance on Democrats to win his runoff race-- has only emboldened them.

...In many ways, Mr. Alexander’s approach, Republican strategists say, is a model for how incumbents should prepare to rebuff a challenger. With his penchant for deal-making with Democrats, a voting record that infuriates Republican purists and a long history in Washington, Mr. Alexander knew he would be vulnerable.

So, unlike Mr. Cochran, Mr. Alexander started laying the groundwork for his re-election early. In January 2012, he quit his Republican leadership post, saying it would “liberate” him to work on issues he cared about. But it also freed him to spend more time at home in Tennessee. Aides hope this will help him avoid the impression, which plagued Mr. Cantor, that he is too entrenched in Washington.

Of course, the real story of the Tea Party defeats this year is that it cost the Republican Establishment an immense amount of money-- for which the Chamber of Commerce, which footed the bill, is getting precious little in return in terms of their agenda-- and, worse yet, has moved the party's center of gravity far to the right, making it harder to go into general elections outside of the Old Confederacy and appeal to normal voters. Tea Party candidates aren't winning-- although they did managed to insert Steve Scalise (R-LA) into the House leadership-- but the Tea Party agenda is now the Republican Party agenda.

The scope of the effort to suppress activist-backed candidates has been broader and costlier than is widely understood, covering at least 20 House and Senate primaries from North Carolina to California, and from coastal Mississippi to the outer tip of Long Island. The loose coalition of establishment forces encompasses two dozen advocacy groups, industry associations and super PACs that have raised and spent millions on behalf of Washington’s chosen candidates. Former Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said the “quote ‘establishment’” had successfully divided up the primary map this year to avoid duplicating one another’s efforts. Eventually, Duncan said, outside groups on the right may realize that they’re better off working with the national party than raging against it. Indeed, in many cases this year, national party favorites have tacked well to the right to win their primaries.

“I think we have to keep on winning. I think we have to show up and make sure that our candidates are not going to be complacent and that they start early,” Duncan said. “That wake-up call certainly seems to have gotten through.”

Nearly a third of the establishment money has come from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The business lobby’s spending in this year’s toughest primaries has about equaled the $7 million that the conservative Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund have spent together on the most fractious elections-- excluding races, like the Senate campaigns in Arkansas and Alaska, where there’s been no meaningful clash between establishment-sanctioned outside groups and the activist right.

And the $23 million figure isn’t even close to a full accounting of what D.C.-backed candidates spent to win their nomination fights. Candidates themselves, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, have collectively spent tens of millions more from their campaign accounts.

Top Republican strategists and party officials say they have no regrets about going all-in against flawed primary candidates. In a perfect world, they say, the whole expensive ordeal would be unnecessary. With conservative outside groups routinely bumping off incumbent lawmakers and prized recruits, it’s simply the cost of doing business-- now and perhaps for the foreseeable future.

Patrick O'Connor, in this morning's Wall Street Journal was more analytic: Tea Party's Poll Setbacks Don't Limit Its Washington Clout. He asserts that the battle of the Export-Import Bank, in which Tea Party Republicans and House progressives are mounting a challenge to the corporate whores of both party Establishments, is the latest example of the Tea Party being far from dead and buried. "[T]he disconnect between tea-party election losses and the movement's continued power in Washington," he wrote, "underscores deep divisions inside the GOP that show no sign of abating after a busy spring in which so-called establishment candidates won far more intraparty contests than they lost. The GOP leadership, for example, benefited from millions of dollars in campaign spending by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to promote leadership-backed candidates in nearly a dozen primaries, part of a broad effort to stem tea party momentum. And yet three of the Chamber's top legislative priorities-- an overhaul of immigration law, a replenished Highway Trust Fund and reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank-- are in jeopardy because of conservative resistance in Congress."

My guess is that Thad Cochran has no intention-- if he even has an understanding-- of granting the NAACP the reciprocity it is asking for. That just isn't how Republican politics is working at a time when the Tea Party can cost the Establishment millions and millions of dollars just by growling some nonsense with a southern drawl.

That Ole Brat Magic Just Failed To Materialize In Mississippi Last Night-- Or Maybe It Was Defeated By Some Ole Black Magic

Karma's a bitch, y'all

Stunning upset last night as Thad Cochran's team managed to inspire enough African American Democrats to come to the polls to defeat bigoted teabagger Chris McDaniel by just over 6,000 votes. Turnout for the runoff was higher than it was in the primary last month-- around 10% higher and almost all the increase was in African-American precincts. I wonder if anyone will ever explain to Cochran what happened and why. If they do, there's always a chance he feels a sense of obligation to moderate his positions the way Lisa Murkowsky did after the Tea Party humiliated her by getting walking freak show Joe Miller the Alaska GOP nomination. She came back and beat him as a write-in candidate with some Democratic help and has been way more moderate ever since, often helping Democrats with tough votes in the Senate. I doubt Cochran will do much of that, but someone could make the argument to him... if he's sentient at all.

When PPP polled Mississippi in 2011, Cochran had a 74/14 approval with Republicans, very similar to Lisa Murkowsky's and Mike Castle's before they were smeared to the gills by deranged teabaggers and defeated in GOP primaries. In any case, Republicans squandered something like $17 million in a primary in Mississippi between two right-wing extremists as far from the mainstream as a politician can possibly get. There are probably no votes where it would matter if Chris McDaniel or Thad Cochran was Mississippi's senator.

Alexander Burns predicted in Politico yesterday that the Senate runoff, which "has torn open long-developing divisions within the GOP power structure," was only the beginning on a bloody civil war inside the Mississippi Republican Party.

The six-term senator and his allies, led by former Gov. Haley Barbour and an army of entrenched figures in Washington and the state capital, have maintained a tight grip on political power in Mississippi since it became a Republican state in the first place.

McDaniel’s campaign has challenged that edifice of party orthodoxy. A confrontational conservative who made a name for himself as a sharp-elbowed member of the Legislature, McDaniel has been surrounded in his race by a throng of ideological fellow travelers in the state Senate. They ride on his campaign bus and speak at his rallies. Like McDaniel, they have campaigned against the establishment in Jackson and enjoy support of the tea party-- and they may set their sights on higher office as early as next year.

Win or lose this week, conservatives here predict that Mississippi’s state elections in 2015 will bring another reckoning for the party. The reality that McDaniel has come so close to unseating Cochran may herald a larger-scale shift in culture for a state where seniority has long been king.

Burns, a senior Beltway reporter, should know better than to refer to McDaniel and his coterie of sociopaths as "conservatives." Cochran is a conservative by any plausible definition. If they differ on policy, McDaniel is far to the right of him. Out of a possible score of 100, ProgressivePunch has Cochran's lifetime crucial vote score at 3.63. It would be more accurate to refer to McDaniel and his followers as "reactionaries" or, more controversially, as "fascists," or-- if one wanted to be less provocative-- neo-fascists or proto-fascists. If this whole kerfuffle is really even about ideology. Isn't it more about personal ambition and the ugly identity politics of the far right of the spectrum?

The ruptures within the Mississippi GOP are as cultural as they are ideological; they have as much to do with tone and temperament as they do with substantive divisions over policy. McDaniel has attacked his opponents-- and the Barbours specifically-- for representing Mississippians who are “relatively wealthy or elite in status,” while losing touch with the priorities of voters in places like his Jones County home.

McDaniel’s campaign manager is a fellow member of the conservative caucus, state Sen. Melanie Sojourner; several other legislators have traveled with McDaniel on his campaign bus, including Watson, Smith and state Sen. Angela Hill. On the night of the June 3 primary election, Watson addressed McDaniel’s victory rally and hailed the candidate as a leader who will “stand up to guys like Haley Barbour.”

And McDaniel’s voters are openly incensed at the candidate’s treatment at the hands of party leaders. Madison retiree Bobbie Jean Mullins, a former county bookkeeper who supports McDaniel, described the Cochran-backing Bryant as a “very good Christian man, but I would have appreciated him more had he said, ‘May the best man win,’ instead of coming out for Thad Cochran.”

As for Haley Barbour, Mullins said: “I’d like to kick his tail.”

…Republican National Committeeman Henry Barbour, who has faced tea party criticism for heading up a pro-Cochran super PAC, said he doesn’t see the in-state support for an insurrection in 2015. “If somebody wants to take on somebody in a state race, they’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. They’re going to have to raise the money,” said Barbour, the former governor’s nephew. “I don’t know that any of [McDaniel’s allies] have demonstrated an ability to do that.”

Those could have been Eric Cantor's last words too.

Before the votes were tallied yesterday, Alexandra Jaffe was threatened with teeth extraction if she didn't write an article for The Hill that began with "If Chris McDaniel on Tuesday knocks off Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), national Democrats will have a rare offensive opportunity in the Deep South." That's incorrect. Yes, it was nasty and divisive and, yes, there are wounds. But wound a state that rarely lets Democrats break into the 40s in statewide races going to vote for a sleazy Blue Dog? "If Cochran is ousted," she wrote, "as multiple polls predict, national Republicans will also be in a tough spot and forced to decide whether they’ll embrace a controversial nominee they’ve spent months trashing." That's conventional wisdom at its worst. I'm sure members of the Barbour family would possibly have refused to vote for McDaniel, but most Mississippi voters would have no problem embracing him and his extremism whatsoever. Presumably Childers won't even try too hard now. At least the DSCC won't flush a bunch of money down the toilet there.

Even wronger: "'If Chris McDaniel is able to win, he will breathe life into several more primaries coming up,' said David Bossie, president of Citizens United. His group backed McDaniel, but now it’s eyeing upcoming Senate primaries in Tennessee and Kansas with a new hope against other longtime incumbents." We'll never know what might have been but the last public polling in Tennessee showed Lamar Alexander beating teabagger Joe Carr 47-7% and the last public polling in Kansas had Pat Roberts up over teababgger Milton Wolf 49-23%.

Caveat: McDaniel hasn't conceded and will demand a recount and will continue whining about African-Americans voting in the White Party Primary. This could still get pretty ugly with lawsuits and investigations and recriminations. What a shame! And there's already moaning from the Palin wing of the GOP about a third party. Yes, what a shame!

Mississippi Runoff Tuesday-- KKK For McDaniel, Brett Farve For Cochran

Amazing new Gallup poll was released yesterday. Gallup's analysis: "Americans' confidence in Congress has sunk to a new low. Seven percent of Americans say they have 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in Congress as an American institution, down from the previous low of 10% in 2013. This confidence is starkly different from the 42% in 1973, the first year Gallup began asking the question… Americans' current confidence in Congress is not only the lowest on record, but also the lowest Gallup has recorded for any institution in the 41-year trend. This is also the first time Gallup has ever measured confidence in a major U.S. institution in the single digits. Currently, 4% of Americans say they have a great deal of confidence in Congress, and 3% have quite a lot of confidence. About one-third of Americans report having 'some' confidence, while half have 'very little,' and another 7% volunteer that they have 'none.'"

The next big test will be Tuesday-- in 4 days-- when Mississippi Republicans go to the polls for a primary runoff. Yesterday, a well-known Mississippi racist-- a pretty typical McDaniel supporter-- had an $800 contribution to McDaniel's campaign returned to him. Carl Ford was the Laurel-based (like McDaniel) lawyer for KKK Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers and is active in the League of the South, a vicious Confederate hate group. Ford was a member of the KKK in Laurel himself, which helps explain his affinity to McDaniel. He says he's backing McDaniel because McDaniel, like himself, is adamantly opposed to immigration reform. Other than a couple of contributions he made to ex-Republican-turned ConservaDem Jim Webb, all of Ford's political contributions have been to blatantly racist Republicans, including one not returned on October 15, 2013 to McDaniel. Other GOP racists who have been happy to take Ford's money include Chip Pickering, Alan Nunnelee, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Pat Buchanan, Christine O'Donnell, and, of course, both the Republican Party of Mississippi and the wonderful NRCC. None of them have returned the KKK cash.

Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce got former Southern Miss and Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre to endorse Cochran this week (ad is up top). Who is he appealing to? Who are all the ads from both sides appealing to? Mississippi Republicans, of course. Want to know what they're like? Watch the video below. That's what they're like. That's who they are. And they are also the targets of Mississippi's brand spanking new voter-ID law which was passed to prevent African Americans and poor people from voting.

Mississippi will use its new voter-identification law for the first time Tuesday, culminating a long political fight in a state with a troubled past of voting rights suppression.

…“Mississippi is one big small town,” Hosemann has said. “When we cast our ballot on Election Day, there is a high probability of knowing the poll workers in the precinct. However, voter ID is not discretionary.”

Lawmakers had squabbled about voter ID since the mid-1990s, with supporters saying it would prevent people from voting under others’ names and opponents saying there has been scant evidence of that type of fraud. Critics also said that an ID requirement would disproportionately hurt minorities, the poor and older voters.

Voters approved a voter ID constitutional amendment in 2011, and legislators put the mandate into law in 2012. Until last summer, Mississippi and other states with a history of racial discrimination had to get federal approval for any changes to elections laws. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling erased that mandate and cleared the way for Mississippi to use its voter ID law, which had been awaiting Justice Department clearance.

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.

Is There A Reasonable Democratic Strategy For Mississippi?

Democrats regularly win statewide races in Maine and South Dakota, though DSCC executive director Guy Cecil, some kind of a self-loathing Beltway creature, has written off both states to the Republicans in November. He's much more excited about spending DSCC millions down in Mississippi on behalf of homophobic, anti-Choice Blue Dog Travis Childers. Don't forget, the last two times Democrats won Senate seats in Mississippi were when John Stennis was reelected in 1982, having first become a senator in 1947, and when James Eastland was reelected in 1972, having first become a senator in 1942. When Eastland retired and resigned early, Thad Cochran was appointed to fill the rest of his term and was then reelected for 6 consecutive 6 year terms. He's utterly senile and not capable of being any more than a figure head for his staff now.

If your career has something to do with being a professional Democrat, the Mississippi Senate race might be exciting. Same if you watch politics as a sporting event. Yes, someone with a bluish t-shirt, reactionary Blue Dog Travis Childers, is said by a few idiots to have a tiny chance to win a Senate seat…. if a bunch of unlikely scenarios place out. Sure, ruthless fascists in the McDaniel campaign locking themselves into a courthouse overnight and tampering with the ballots is a fun Republican story… but it is a Republican story, a Mississippi Republican story and what does it have to do with normal Americans?

By hook or by crook, McDaniel is likely to win the June 24 run-off.

Cochran carried large areas of the state on Tuesday, winning 52 of 82 counties. He was strong in metro Jackson, which gave him a 9,000 vote margin. He won the Biloxi-Gulfport and Tupelo-Columbus areas, but by lesser vote margins.

But in several areas where McDaniel won, he won big, with huge margins in his home area of the Pine Belt and tea party strongholds. The Hattiesburg-Laurel area gave him about a 12,000 vote margin.

McDaniel also appeared to pull a couple of upsets, or at least surprises for the Cochran campaign. He won what had been predicted as the battleground, DeSoto County, handily at 63 percent, although turnout there was relatively low. He topped Cochran slightly in Jackson County and kept Cochran's margins relatively slim elsewhere on the Coast, projected to be a Cochran stronghold.

Cochran is believed to have enjoyed at least a small amount of "crossover" Democrats voting for him in the Republican primary. That prospect will likely diminish in a runoff, and those who voted Democratic in the primary are prohibited from voting Republican in a runoff. They might not want to anyway. Democratic nominee Travis Childers is believed to stand a better shot-- albeit a long one-- of defeating McDaniel in a general where Mississippians tend to vote heavily Republican in federal elections.

Both campaigns' cupboards appear bare at this point. At last report, Cochran had $681,000 cash on hand; McDaniel, $237,000. Both are probably much lower after late-race spending on get-out-the-vote efforts.

Cochran raised at least $3.6 million for the primary; McDaniel, $1.2 million. But super PACs and other outside groups spent more than $8 million on the race, including $5 million from national tea-party-oriented groups for McDaniel.

Some of McDaniel's biggest outside benefactors on Wednesday were enthusiastically pledging more support. The Club for Growth PAC vowed to "vigorously pursue this race to its conclusion." Freedom Works for American vowed to "double down" its ground game help for McDaniel. Strapped for cash on his own, McDaniel needs the outside support.

Some of Cochran's third-party support, such as the National Republican Senatorial Committee appeared more reticent about spending more in a internecine Republican runoff battle.

But the Mississippi Conservatives PAC, run by former Gov. Haley Barbour's nephew Henry Barbour, plans to stay in the game. Barbour said the PAC is "reloading the weaponry."

And Cochran has been a consummate fundraiser himself and can likely raise at least enough to mount a serious three-week media campaign.

McDaniel's obvious strategy is to stay the course, capitalize on growing anti-Washington, anti-incumbent sentiment and keep his base fired up, waving signs and ready to vote.

"He was written off by the media and attacked by the establishment, yet here he stands on the cusp of making history," said Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund Chairman Jenny Beth Martin. "With all his momentum, I like his chances in three weeks."

Cochran needs a relatively large turnout for the runoff. He is going to have to clarify his message and keep his cadre of state Republican "establishment" leaders such as Gov. Phil Bryant working for him-- which may become more difficult as they read the tea (party) leaves.

"This race is now about whether we want a U.S. senator who puts Mississippi interests first or a U.S. senator controlled by the outside people who have hijacked the tea party," said Henry Barbour. "The message needs to be about what life would be like without Thad Cochran-- at Ingalls (shipyard) or Keesler Air Force Base or in Meridian-- without Thad Cochran and what life will be like with a candidate who just wants to be another Ted Cruz and make a bunch of speeches and not do anything for Mississippi."

Cochran is going to have to show up. His campaign is increasingly plagued by questions of whether the 76-year-old is actually engaged. His campaign events have been guarded by his handlers, with little or no advance notice to the general public or media, and stump speeches or interviews rare.

Notably, Cochran failed to appear before his supporters gathered Tuesday night for his campaign party. This move is likely to plague him for the next three weeks.

…Club for Growth issued a statement calling on Cochran to withdraw from the race.

Still, for all the Sturm und Drang, McDaniel only finished with around 1,000 more votes than Cochran-- 49.5%. No one can be sure he's going to win what's likely to be a low-turn-out primary runoff. And if he does, the likelihood that he'd beat Childers anymore is enormous.

[E]ven if the national political environment favors Democrats on Election Day, the effect in the Mississippi will probably be minimal. Mississippi is inelastic; it has few swing voters. The state’s large black population routinely gives 90 percent or more of its vote to Democrats, while the white population usually doles out 80 percent or more of its vote to Republicans.

Democrats don’t just lose; they tend to lose by the same amount year after year. In gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections since 2003, every Democratic candidate got between 35 percent and 46 percent of the vote.

It’s possible that Childers will break this streak: He has shown he can win over conservative voters. The state’s 1st District, which he represented in Congress, was more Republican than the state as a whole.

But the partisan gravity in Mississippi is strong and hard to reverse. Childers is a clear underdog.

Clearly, if McDaniel wins, the brain surgeons Guy Cecil at the DSCC hopes to elect a far right fake-Democrat, who would probably switch parties before his term was even half up, and who will certainly be much further right than Manchin. Judging by everything he's been up to since he took over the committee by selecting a weak and ineffective boss, Michael Bennet, Cecil, seems to think this is a far more effective strategy than trying to win states where actual Democrats actually win elections, like Maine (Shenna Bellows) and South Dakota (Rick Weiland). Instead of wasting your resources on trying to elect a Republican disguised as a Democrat in a state that won't elect Democrats, please consider chipping in for Shenna and Rick here.

Another Blue Dog Made The Natural Transition To The GOP-- Will Gene Taylor Beat Steven Palazzo In Tomorrow's Republican Primary?

Sunday morning we asked what it's like to be a Blue Dog in America today. And the picture that emerged was far from pretty. When looking at the natural progression from Blue Dog-- the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- to plain old Republican, we focused on the freak from Kansas who led the anti-gay and anti-Choice forces of hatred and bigotry in her badly afflicted state, Janice Pauls, finally finding her natural home in the GOP. But tomorrow-- primary day in Mississippi-- another failed Blue Dog, defeated congressman Gene Taylor is looking for a comeback… as-- what else?-- a Republican.

He's ignoring FEC rules that require him to report the source of the quarter million dollars he's spending on the race. Is he getting covert support from the Blue Dog caucus in the GOP primary. No one will know before tomorrow, that's for sure. The biggest newspaper in the southeast Mississippi district, MS-04-- PVI is R+21 and Obama won 31% of the vote in 2008 and 2012-- endorsed Taylor. It's a crowded primary and the Tea Party has a couple of crackpots in the race even more extreme that Steven Palazzo or Taylor (which ain't easy). Although the open primary allows Democrats to vote in the GOP contest, Taylor is unlikely to beat Palazzo and even forcing a June 24th run-off is a stretch.

When asked to explain his transformation from a Blue Dog to a Republican, Taylor has no trouble at all. It's perfectly natural and may Mississippi Republicans are former Blue Dogs themselves. “I’ll make it very simple. When I first went to Congress, almost all of the southern Democrats were pro-life, almost all of them were for 2nd Amendment rights, almost all of them believed in a strong national defense, and almost all of them believed in a balanced budget. Over the years that changed."

It's been a quiet race compared to the bitter primary between Establishment Republican Thad Cochran and far right extremist, neo-fascist Chris McDaniel for Senate. (There's also a defeated Blue Dog in that race, Travis Childers, who's hoping McDaniel wins and that he get slip into office as a result of the GOP civil war, something like Indiana Blue Dog Joe Donnelly did when a neo-fascist took out Dick Lugar in the Republican primary.)

Taylor, who served 11 terms as a "Blue Dog" Democrat starting in 1989, switched parties to take on Rep. Steven Palazzo in the Republican primary.

But Palazzo, who topped Taylor in 2010, is in the catbird's seat now, according to Stephen L. Rozman, professor of political science at Tougaloo College in Jackson.

"It's difficult because Palazzo is entrenched," Rozman said. "Palazzo is still going to recall Taylor's past, looking at him as opportunistic, trying to get in as a Republican. It's an uphill battle."

In addition to 44-year-old Palazzo of Biloxi and 60-year-old Taylor of Bay St. Louis, three other GOP candidates seek the seat-- 48-year-old Tom Carter of Carriere, 24-year-old Tavish Kelly of Picayune and 73-year-old Ron Vincent of Hattiesburg.

…"So, what does Taylor do? As a Democrat, he lost the last time, and momentum is going against a Democrat winning. So, he's doing what he has to do. He's doing it in the primary."

..."People aren't being fooled," Palazzo told the Associated Press. "You can't be a lifelong Democrat and wake up the day of the qualifying deadline and say, 'I'm a Republican.'"

Taylor, though, says people thank him for running.

"I think people have realized they want a congressman that's accessible to them, that they can talk to face-to-face," Taylor told the AP.

When Palazzo unseated Taylor, his margin of victory came from support in three inland counties, Pearl River, Lamar and Jones. Taylor says he's focusing more attention away from the coast this time around.

Taylor has hammered Palazzo repeatedly for his 2012 vote to approve the Biggert-Waters flood insurance law, under which the Federal Emergency Management Agency proposed expensive rate increases.

"He voted to raise peoples' flood insurance rates by unlimited amounts," Taylor told the AP.

Palazzo said "no one" foresaw how FEMA would administer the proposed changes. "Congress' intent was for them to do an affordability study," he said.

Palazzo voted in March with most other members to defang that law, which he says is his top achievement.

Taylor also says Palazzo isn't doing enough to protect the district's military bases and criticized him for balking at supporting money to pay flood insurance claims following 2012's Superstorm Sandy.

Taylor says the Sandy vote will hurt Palazzo's ability to seek hurricane aid for the Mississippi coast in the future. Palazzo disputes that, though, saying even as one of the House's more conservative members, "I can still get things done."

Here's Taylor demonizing Nancy Pelosi-- and claiming Palazzo supports her-- in a crude TV spot:

Mississippi Is Going To Elect Someone… To The U.S. Senate

And the Democrat still isn't worth voting for!

Joe Manchin (WV) is the most conservative Democrat in the Senate. According to ProgressivePunch, his lifetime crucial vote score is 60.71, pretty dreadful. He's the 55th "most progressive" member of the Senate. Every Republican is worse. The 5 Democrats almost as bad as Machin-- from bad to worse-- are Kay Hagan (NC), Joe Donnelly (IN), John Walsh (MT), Mark Pryor (AR), Mary Landrieu (LA), all in red or purple states. These 6 cross the aisle and vote with Republicans far more than any other Democrats. The half dozen Republicans who occasionally cross the aisle in the other direction and vote with the Democrats are Susan Collins (ME), Dean Heller (NV), John McCain (AZ), Mark Kirk (IL), Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Roy Blunt (MO) are all from blue or purple states. Their ProgressivePunch lifetime crucial vote scores are between 27.81 (Collins) and 7.07 (Blunt), astonishingly right-wing. Even Collins, who votes with the Democrats more than any of the other Republicans, almost never does and Santorum famously reported that she's a team player and that when the extreme right needs her, she's always there for them. Always. And she's the best of the lot, the 56th "most progressive" member of the Senate, right after Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu and Joe Manchin. Going down below the 6 who sometimes vote with the Democrats, you pass right-wing extremists Rand Paul (7.03), Mike Lee (6.52), Chuck Grassley (5.44), David Vitter (4.59), Pat Toomey (3.80) until you come to the Republican with the 74th "most progressive" lifetime voting record in the Senate, Mississippi's Thad Cochran (3.65), just a tiny bit more conservative than Toomey's and a tiny bit less conservative than Tom Coburn (3.17).

The deranged neo-fascist politician who took over Club for Growth when Pat Toomey gave up the job to run for the Senate, Chris Chocola, sent a poison-pen article to Mississippi's influential Sun Herald that they published today, Thad Cochran Has A Liberal Record In The U.S. Senate. Spoiler: he doesn't, at least not unless you define "liberal" as anything that doesn't measure up to a Mussolini-like agenda. Chocola has endorsed Chris McDaniel, whose agenda does measure up to a Mussolini-like agenda. Chocola and McDaniel point out that the 41 year old McDaniel has seen Cochran, an incumbent of 42 years, in Congress his whole life and that tenure "is part of the reason why we have $17 trillion in debt… Why would his seventh term be any different from the last six?"

Sen. Cochran has a liberal voting record. That's a fact. Even the staunchest defenders of Cochran will never deny that Cochran has voted for the following things:

• He voted to create the Department of Education under Jimmy Carter in the 1970s.

• He voted for the 1990 income tax increase under President George H.W. Bush that broke Bush's famous "read my lips, no new taxes" promise.

• He voted to fund ObamaCare and to raise the debt ceiling-- he's actually voted to raise the debt ceiling 20 times.

All of those are facts. Period. They are not in dispute.

And while Sen. Cochran has been in office, the debt has gone from practically nothing to $17 trillion. That's a fact too. It's part of the reason he was given one of the lowest ratings by the American Conservative Union of any Republican Senator during the Obama era, a 63 percent.

A lot is made about projects in Mississippi that Thad Cochran got federal money for. What his supporters (many of whom are lobbyists who are paid to get politicians like Cochran to appropriate money for one project or another) fail to mention is that for every building in Mississippi Sen. Cochran voted for, he also had to vote to spend Mississippi tax dollars on things like a Woodstock Museum in New York or a Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Oklahoma or a Lobster Institute in Maine. All of which, like Sen. Cochran's pork projects, received millions of dollars paid for by Mississippi taxpayers.

Thad Cochran loves to tout his pork projects even as the rest of the Republican Party has taken the opposite position on pork. Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner opposes them. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, opposes them. 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney opposes them. Even President Obama-- hardly a conservative-- opposes them. Not Sen. Cochran.

Today, a typically crackpot right-wing polling firm showed the race a dead heat, although the survey was done in December. More reliable polling by PPP shows a tough race but with Cochran still beating McDaniel.

55% of GOP primary voters say they would prefer a 'more conservative' alternative to Cochran, compared to just 35% who say they support the long time Senator. And although Cochran still leads primary challenger Chris McDaniel 44/38, much of that lead is attributable to his higher name recognition. Among the 50% of primary voters who have heard of McDaniel, whether they like him or not, Cochran trails his challenger 60/29.

Cochran's approval numbers with Republican voters have dropped precipitously over the last two years. In November of 2011 we found him with a 74/14 approval spread with them, but that's declined now to 45/42. Unsurprisingly Cochran's problems are coming with the furthest right segment of his party. Among voters describing themselves as 'very conservative' he has just a 34/55 approval spread, trails McDaniel 51/32 head to head, and loses out to a generic 'more conservative' alternative 74/22.

If Cochran is the Republican nominee for the Senate next year the seat likely won't be competitive. He actually has a positive approval rating with Democrats at 44/40 and that crossover support would make him close to unbeatable in a general election. He leads Travis Childers, who has actually floated the possibility of running, 50/33 in a head to head. He's also up 50/37 on Ronnie Musgrove and 45/43 on Jim Hood in hypothetical contests.

If McDaniel is the Republican nominee though it looks like there's at least some chance at a competitive race forming. He leads both Childers (41/38) and Musgrove (44/41) by just 3 points in head to heads and actually trails Hood by a couple points at 43/41. McDaniel just doesn't have the same kind of support across party lines that Cochran does.

“Thad Cochran’s in pretty serious danger of losing the primary next year,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “Conservatives have really soured on him over the last couple years and are ready for someone new.”

The most recent poll, also from December though, was done by another GOP group, Harper. Only Republicans were polled, no normal people. They showed Cochran's favorables at 64.10%, unfavorables at 27.92%. McDaniels was still pretty unknown-- almost 50%-- but his favorable/unfavorable breakdown was 33.05%/16.60%.

Related questions get to the heart of why Mississippi is the most backward state in the country and the most miserable place for a non-millionaire to live:

If McDaniel wins, the DSCC hopes to elect a far right fake-Democrat, Travis Childers, who would probably switch parties before his term was even half up, and who will certainly be much further right than Manchin. Beltway imbecile and DSCC dictator, Guy Cecil, thinks this is a far more effective strategy than trying to win states where actual Democrats actually win elections, like Maine (Shenna Bellows) and South Dakota (Rick Weiland).