Desperate times, desperate measures: Thad Cochran woos black Democrats in Mississippi
We've got a Hail Mary being thrown in Mississippi. From the New York Times:
As Sen. Thad Cochran, the veteran Republican, fights for his political life in Mississippi by taking the unexpected step of courting black Democrats, conservative organizations working to defeat him are planning to deploy poll watchers to monitor his campaign’s turnout operation in Tuesday’s runoff election.
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars backing Cochran’s Tea Party opponent, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, said in an interview on Sunday that his group was joining with Freedom Works and the Tea Party Patriots in a “voter integrity project” in Mississippi. Your daily jolt on politics from the AJC's Political insider blog
The groups will deploy observers in areas of the state where Cochran is recruiting Democrats, Cuccinelli said. J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department official and conservative commentator who said he was advising the effort, described these potential poll watchers as “election observers,” mostly Mississippi residents, who will be trained to “observe whether the law is being followed.”
Jenny Beth Martin, founder of Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, checks her smartphone for the address of another registered Republican voter in this northeast Jackson, Miss., neighborhood, as she and other party members stump for state Sen. Chris McDaniel, R-Ellisville, in Tuesday’s GOP runoff against incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss. AP/Rogelio V. Solis
Meanwhile, the Washington Post this morning uses the Mississippi runoff as an excuse to a look at Cherokee County's Jenny Beth Martin and Tea Party Patriots, which is backing Republican Chris McDaniel.
The Post uses the opportunity to address Martin’s $450,000 annual salary, a libel lawsuit filed by an ex-tea party associate, and the group’s absence from David Brat’s upset of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., earlier this month:
[T]he Tea Party Patriots dismiss such criticism of their spending, noting that in the Mississippi race they have paid for radio and television ads, paid for research about Cochran living at the same address as a staff member, and bought a Web site that details his "questionable" travel at WheresThad.com. As for Martin's salary, her lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, says via e-mail: "Jenny Beth works her tail off, travels constantly, sleeps about 4 hours per night — runs two very demanding organizations and is paid by each separately to run them. . . . Whatever it is that she's paid, it is not enough in my opinion."
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Speaking of crossover voting: Usually, it doesn't work, but sometimes it does. One of those sometimes is likely to be in Georgia on July 22, in the DeKalb County runoff for sheriff, where acting incumbent Jeff Mann faces former county CEO Vernon Jones.
You might call this a case of officially sanctioned crossover voting. Because incumbent sheriff Tom Brown left mid-term, to make an unsuccessful Democratic challenge to U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, the contest is a special election to fill the rest of Brown’s term.
That makes it nonpartisan. Which means that white, north county Republicans drawn to the polls by a fiery U.S. Senate runoff will also be able to participate in a fight that would normally be settled by African-American Democrats down in south DeKalb.
Over at myajc.com, our friend Bill Torpy went to a candidate forum in south DeKalb. Mann wasn't there, but Jones was:
Jones turned his head and then his whole body away from me. So, I walked round to where his front was. But it immediately became his back. And then again. And again.
The only politician I saw employ this no-comment strategy was former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who tried to rally South DeKalb just as Jones is trying this time.
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Jerusalem's King David Hotel hosted two U.S. governors this weekend – one current and one former. Nathan Deal, the former, is currently in Israel (as is the Insider's Greg Bluestein) for a trade mission. Arkansas's Mike Huckabee, the latter, is in town for a speech.
Huckabee endorsed Deal back in 2010, and Deal hadn't forgotten. When Huckabee expressed (undoubtedly faux) concern that a picture of the two of them together would hurt Deal’s general election chances, the Georgia governor was having none of it.
"You helped me get there in the first place," Deal said.
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A bill to revive aspects of the Voting Rights Act that would subject Georgia and three other states to U.S. Justice Department scrutiny before any changes to their election laws go into effect will get a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday.
With the defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor ousted in a primary fight earlier this month, the odds are stacked heavily against congressional passage, but Secretary of State Brian Kemp is taking no chances.
The man in charge of Georgia’s elections has penned a letter to U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, that objects to any law that would treat Georgia differently from the other 49 states. A taste:
Our research indicates that the "violations" that would place Georgia back under pre-clearance are not state laws that were found to be discriminatory. Rather, the "violations" refer almost exclusively to city or county redistricting plans or other minor changes. To subject an entire state to the administrative and financial burdens of pre-clearance based on these objections is a remedy in search of a wrong.
Read the entire letter here:
About the Author
Jim Galloway, the newspaper’s former political columnist, was a writer and editor at the AJC for four decades.
