JACKSON — It could be days or weeks before Mississippians know the results of a bitter and expensive Republican Senate primary between six-term incumbent Thad Cochran and a tea party-backed challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel.
The race was too close to call on election night Tuesday.
With a third candidate on the ballot, neither Cochran nor McDaniel managed to get at least 50 percent plus one vote — the threshold to win outright and avoid a June 24 runoff. An unknown number of absentee and provision ballots remain to be counted.
Former U.S. Rep. Travis Childers won the Democratic nomination for Senate, defeating three other candidates, including Bill Marcy, who has twice run unsuccessfully for the U.S. House as a tea party Republican. He will be on the Nov. 4 general election ballot, as will the Republican nominee and the Re-form Party’s Shawn O’Hara.
At his campaign party in Hattiesburg late Tuesday, McDaniel, 41, told cheering supporters: “Whether it’s tomorrow or three weeks from tonight, we will stand victorious in this race.”
Cochran, 76, did not speak at his party in Jackson. U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper, who campaigned for Cochran, told the crowd there that the race appeared headed to a runoff.
“When it comes to the future of our state, Thad Cochran is the future,” Harper said.
This is one of the closest statewide elections in 15 years and the toughest for Cochran in his four-decade career.
Mississippi has not had a Democrat in the U.S. Senate since early 1989. Childers said Tuesday that if he’s elected to the Senate, he will advocate policies to help the working class, including strengthening public education.
“I’m tired of watching Mississippi families just get by,” Childers said. “I want them to get ahead.”
Childers won north Mississippi’s 1st District U.S. House seat in a 2008 special election and was unseated in 2010 by a Republican who painted him as an ally of Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was then House speaker. Childers bristled at the portrayal, noting he had voted against Pelosi on big bills, including the health care overhaul President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010.
Third-party groups spent about $8.4 million in Mississippi’s Republican Senate primary, mostly on TV ads. Cochran’s campaign spent $3 million and McDaniel’s spent $1 million.
The Republican contest took a bizarre turn in mid-May when four McDaniel supporters were arrested in what Madison police said was a plot to photograph Cochran’s wife on Easter Sunday in the nursing home where she has lived the past 13 years with dementia. Investigators said an image of Rose Cochran appeared in an anti-Cochran video that was briefly posted online April 26.
McDaniel has called the incident reprehensible and said he had nothing to do with it.
Still, some voters had their doubts.
Dyline Lee, 60, of Pearl, said she voted for Cochran because she believes McDaniel will ultimately be tied to the photo of Rose Cochran.
“I believe he was behind it,” Lee said. “I believe they’re going to trace it back to him. I just don’t like it when they play dirty like that.”
Tea party stars traveled to Mississippi in the past week to campaign for McDaniel, including Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.
Cynthia Floyd Moore, 54, of Grenada, is a Republican former political consultant who said she spent an hour and a half waving a McDaniel sign next to a busy road after she voted for him Tuesday. She said she likes McDaniel’s pledge to support term limits and believes “he will stand for our Constitution.”
Moore said she respects Cochran but believes he has been in office too long.
Cochran was first elected to the Senate in 1978 after six years in the House. He is a former Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, and top Republicans in the state praised him for bringing billions of dollars over the years.
Former Gov. Haley Barbour sent an email to more than 2,000 people last week praising Cochran and criticizing the out-of-state groups that spent big money to try to unseat the senator.
“These groups don’t care about Mississippi; they don’t know the difference between Pascagoula and Pontotoc,” Barbour wrote.
The Madison Group, a small-government advocacy group based in Texas, is among those that spent money to support McDaniel. In an email Monday, it called for help in a get-out-the-vote effort to defeat Cochran and “make this the Waterloo for the GOP establishment.
