McCOMB — Last month’s Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, as many pundits already have noted, took several unprecedented bizarre twists.
But as a reader of Mississippi history and a reporter who has covered Mississippi politics since 1959, I am fascinated by the similarities of the Thad Cochran-Chris McDaniel race and some past elections.
The Cochran-McDaniel fray was unique in that it pulled in record and massive amounts of money from out-of-state interest groups. It also was different from two I’ll mention below because it was a Republican primary. Until now, the state GOP, with perhaps a couple of exceptions, was kinder and gentler in choosing its nominees.
But this Republican race took on the characteristics of the Democratic primaries from the early 20th century until the late 1970s, when winning the Democratic primaries in Mississippi was “tantamount to being elected.”
From the days of James K. Vardaman and Theodore G. Bilbo until Ross Barnett was elected governor in 1959 and Paul Johnson Jr. succeeded him in 1963, an overriding issue in most statewide elections was who could best preserve racial segregation.
That changed after the fruition of the Civil Rights movement and the Voting Rights Act, which gave African-Americans the unfettered right to vote and sent many more of them to the polls.
But an underlying theme remains the same.
A skilled politician can harvest a lot of votes in this state by running against the powers that be in Washington, D.C., or in some years Jackson, Miss.
Instead of fighting Washington to maintain segregation, now it’s about what is perceived to be too much federal money going to those who don’t deserve it, resistance to gun control, government regulation and a plethora of social issues advocated by liberals.
Beyond that is a historic underlying antipathy of working-class Mississippians to the wealthy and the powerful: The Delta planters versus the hill farmers in the past, the country club Republicans versus the tea party fundamentalists these days, the city dwellers versus the small town and country folks.
Chris McDaniel, I believe, captured some of the same votes Cliff Finch got in the governor’s race back in 1975 when he upset William Winter in the Democratic primary by putting together an unlikely coalition of rural whites and African-Americans.
This despite Winter’s record as a racial moderate or that most of Finch’s white supporters were anything but moderate on race. Finch’s campaign of carrying a lunch box and driving a bulldozer captured the hearts and votes of enough people to win the election.
Four years earlier, in 1971, Bill Waller had successfully defeated Lt. Gov. Charles Sullivan in the governor’s race by running against what he called “the Capitol Street gang” in Jackson.
This year, though, the “establishment” or the “Capitol Street gang” beat the tea party group, which I’d wager included a good many white senior citizens who voted for Cliff Finch in 1975.
It was the insiders or the establishment that carried the day June 24 by, among other tactics, convincing enough African-American voters to go to the Republican primary. Unlike when they abandoned Winter in 1975, they supported the more moderate candidate this time.
I wonder when, if ever, some charismatic candidate will again, like Cliff Finch, put together enough disgruntled rural white and black votes to win a statewide election in Mississippi.
