Tip O’Neill said “all politics is local.” With all the out-of-state money pouring into Mississippi for the Republican primary and runoff between Thad Cochran and his Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel, all the national dynamics that seem to be in play, all the rather absurd attempts by McDaniel’s supporters to paint Cochran as something approaching a liberal, I’m still reminded of O’Neill’s words.
There was much speculation starting a couple of years ago about whether Thad Cochran would run for re-election. Several prominent Republicans began being mentioned as possible successors: current Second District Representative Gregg Harper, Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, State Auditor Stacy Pickering (a cousin of one-time heir-apparent and former Congressman Chip Pickering). On the Democratic side, Attorney General Jim Hood was a frequent topic of discussion, along with former Attorney General Mike Moore, who was once the perennial hope for Mississippi Democrats for every prominent political post until it became obvious that he really wasn’t going to return to the political circus. And there was a little-known state senator from south Mississippi, Chris McDaniel, playing hard for the Tea Party crowd.
But everybody save McDaniel was waiting for Thad to decide whether he would run. No serious potential candidate was going to challenge Thad Cochran in what would be an unwinnable race. But it became an odd sort of dance. Nobody was going to start putting a campaign together until Thad decided, and the talk on the ground was that Cochran was waiting to see if someone he liked was going to run before he decided. Meanwhile McDaniel was working the fringes, in what many people saw as an attempt on his part to raise his profile for future campaigns.
In November 2013, Cochran announced he was running for re-election, and the other Republicans (again, save McDaniel) went away. On the Democratic side, Jim Hood declined to run, but former First District Representative Travis Childers announced he was running. Childers was elected in a special election in 2008 when then-Congressman Roger Wicker was appointed to fill Trent Lott’s vacated Senate seat, was re-elected in the 2008 elections, then was defeated in the Tea Party surge of 2010. With Cochran running for re-election, Childers was considered a non-factor.
In Mississippi, godliness is next to incumbency.
But a curious thing happened as winter moved into spring.
McDaniel was everywhere, and Cochran was nowhere. In his defense, Cochran was running for re-election the same way he always had – put your name on the ballot, and wait for the votes to roll in. And through December, January, February, March, April, what polls were taken showed Cochran with a comfortable lead. As April gave way to May, however, things began to get interesting. For the first time, some polls showed McDaniel with a slight lead. But because the entire Republican establishment in Mississippi, including the popular former Governor Haley Barbour, current Governor Phil Bryant, Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves, and all the movers and shakers, were backing Cochran, there was little alarm evidenced in Cochran’s camp.
Around this time, however, people began to notice that Cochran was making few campaign appearances and interviews. He was relying on proxies to do most of the actual on-the-ground campaigning. And people began to wonder if his heart was really in this thing. Then the McDaniel campaign and those close to it began floating rumors that Thad Cochran was engaged in a less-than-appropriate relationship with his long-time aide Kay Webber. Cochran’s wife Rose has been confined to a nursing home outside of Jackson for years because of dementia.
Cochran and Webber have for some time been often seen at social events, and he rents a basement apartment at her home. Prior to the accusations by the McDaniel camp, there’s never been any discussion of improprieties between the two. But it became a brief issue in the run-up to the June primary.
Then the election took a bizarre turn when a local blogger was arrested on charges of sneaking into Rose Cochran’s room on Easter Sunday, taking a video of her and briefly posting it on the internet. The McDaniel campaign, in a series of sometimes contradictory statements, denied any involvement, and tried to turn it around on Cochran by claiming that they had suppressed news of the incident until right before the primary. But the polls showed that McDaniel’s support was steady, even after a state Tea Party official was arrested on a charge related to the incident.
Through the entire series of events, Thad Cochran remained oddly passive. He made a few statements, but generally kept things low-key. And McDaniel continued his single-minded campaign strategy – bashing Cochran for being willing to compromise and support Obamacare and debt-limit increases and pork-barrel spending. One thing Thad Cochran has always done is funnel Federal money to Mississippi projects, and his willingness to work across the aisle has benefited the state for years. This was never more in evidence than in the period following Hurricane Katrina, when hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal aid poured into south Mississippi. McDaniel meanwhile was quoted as saying he didn’t know if he would have voted for the aid.
In a state so dependent on Federal emergency recovery money, that should have been a fatal gaffe. And yet, somehow, the polls showed McDaniel continuing to lead. Conventional wisdom said McDaniel shouldn’t be close, yet Cochran was losing ground.
And on the night of June 3, when the vote counting began, reality began to set in. Chris McDaniel held a small but consistent throughout the night, buoyed by a strong showing in south Mississippi, even the coastal counties hardest hit by Katrina, where Cochran should have been unbeatable. At one point, it even looked like McDaniel might win the primary outright, but a third candidate in the race, an unknown named Thomas Carey, pulled just enough votes to deny McDaniel the 50% + 1 that he needed.
So now we’re in the midst of a runoff. McDaniel continues to lambast Cochran for being a moderate. Cochran, who vowed to make the runoff a fight, continues to be fairly passive, although he has made a few appearances. And the impression that he never really wanted to run for re-election hovers around the edges of his campaign.
“All politics is local”. For all that Cochran has done for Mississippi, the feeling that he just wanted to come home seems to negate his many accomplishments. For McDaniel, it meant that he would play hard in his base of south Mississippi. He received overwhelming support in most of the southern counties, too much for Cochran and the Republican establishment to overcome. Cochran’s career deserves a better end that what appears to be coming.
If he does lose to McDaniel, many will look back and say he should have let six terms be enough. Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.