Posted on 06/27/2014 4:28:12 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
By now you've probably seen the reaction to Tuesday night’s Mississippi Republican Senate primary election, in which shaky incumbent Thad Cochran eked out a victory over Tea Party insurgent Chris McDaniel by making use of some rather unconventional electoral tactics.
Cochran dedicated most of his efforts to pursuing Democrats, and specifically the black community. He went so far as to threaten his new voting base by saying McDaniel would cut food stamps,and made conspicuous charges of racism against both McDaniel and the Tea Party. There were further allegations, substantiated in news reports, of “street money” paid to Democratic fixers to turn out the votes of,shall we say,“new” Republican voters crossing over to vote for Cochran on a one-time basis.
The result was exactly what Cochran and his allies,including former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, wanted and needed. Cochran managed to pull in some 35,000 “crossover” Democratic voters in a race he won by less than 7,000 votes. This created what appears to be a peculiar result:McDaniel won a relatively clear majority of Republican votes in a Republican primary, and still lost the election by a fifty-one to forty-nine margin.
To say that the Tea Party and conservative activists are unhappy about these developments would be a massive understatement....Erick Erickson delivered a stinging rebuke of Cochran’s tactics and a stern warning about the effect they might have on the already-shaky relations between the party’s Washington leadership and its conservative base:............
....But most of all,there is a lot of soul-searching going on—particularly on the part of a number of the Senate’s more outspoken conservatives, who might have gone into Mississippi to help McDaniel but for their having made a pledge not to campaign against incumbents.“That pledge would have to presuppose that Cochran wouldn’t run a Democratic campaign in a Republican primary, right?” said one of the staffers.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Thanks. I want to give every FReeper the opportunity to make their voice heard. Keep up your good work.
done
I did!
Tell me how much longer we are going to have OPEN primaries, where the ENEMY can vote and severely skew the wishes of REPUBLICANS?
There’s no such thing as a political party you can trust, so if you think you’ll find purity and honor elsewhere, you won’t. Politics by its nature is corrupting, and the only thing the average citizen can hope to do is keep enough people in power who will at least broadly share a certain set of positions (the party platform). So pick the platform you like best - hope it’s not the Dems, of course - and vote for the people in that party, trying to get the best ones you can in the primaries (which means that you’ve got to get a majority of the party’s other voters on board, a particularly difficult thing in the case of a long-term incumbent). Theoretically, that’s how it should work.
That said, this stunt in Mississippi goes way beyond just normal GOP maneuvering, and undermines the primary system. I can’t believe there’s no grounds for some kind of charges in this. I hope McDaniel pursues this aggressively. If nothing else, it’s making the GOP-e look really, really bad and I think the blow-back may prevent them from trying such tactics in other cases.
The GOP always saves its viciousness for the primaries (remember Romney vs. the other candidates?) but is meek as lambs when it comes to fighting the Dems. That’s got to change.
Ah, the old cutting off your nose to spite your face tactic!
" ... net employment growth in the United States since 2000 has gone entirely to immigrants, legal and illegal." and
"The supply of potential workers is enormous: 8.7 million native college graduates are not working, as are 17 million with some college, and 25.3 million with no more than a high school education."
So, "natives" welcome to the "new hood". Those in say, Ohio, how are those "good paying jobs" from a certain a certain campaign going for you?
Those "native" frogs, at first parboiled, now are finishing in to a crispy-fried.
I did. Thanks for the link.
We’re not done with the fraud investigation yet,
Some good comments at the source.
I saw where the Cochran people were asking MS county registrars to wait until the last day to certify the county results, leaving the McDaniel camp no time to examine and appeal.
“Soul search” all you want, GOP. You have burned the most important bridge imaginable.
Thad is only going to be there for a year or two. Then the seat will be auctioned off so the highest bidder can be the incumbent for any special election and the next general in 2020.
As for the soul-searching, maybe the GOP could check on the receipt from when they sold their souls... it often has the buyers address and phone number.
Followed by burning down your barn to get rid of the rats.
cutting off your nose to spite your face, I see. Why not send a clear message to the GOPe and reward the conservative R's?
Your plan is not well thought out, IMHO
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the tea party the constitution party. I am becoming disenthralled with them, too. They tried to get me to vote for a candidate in the GA senate race that is not known for conservative values. He may be a good businessman and his father, Sonny Perdue was a former governor, but the son is not so conservative. (Nor was his father, really.) I’m voting for Jack Kingston in the run-off. Sorry, TP groups, but facts are still facts. Jack is more conservative than Perdue and he’s pretty well-known in the state, being our representative. I didn’t vote for him initially, as I felt there was a better candidate, who only placed 3rd. Oh well.
Not only that, but the phone calls that are really annoying. I cannot afford to give now. They will not take “NO, not right now.” for an answer! Their answer? But you have a credit card, right? @#$%&$!! So, I am not giving to ANY of the TP groups. I can only afford to give directly to candidates. I’m a little POd at the salaries these TP people seem to be raking in, as well. It seems to become a problem, once any group is established, they start to give themselves more perks.
If there is a real Constitution party, I think I am about ready to join it, but I’d want to know more about it. The TP needs to make some reassessments and rename themselves. The democrats have pretty much branded the TP as racist, homophobic, anti-everything. While the initial TP title had a meaning, the TP doesn’t even make the connection for people any more.
This is just rampant idiocy.
Cock got MANY FEWER R E P U B L I C A N votes than his challenger.
The problem, dumbasses, is letting Dhimmocrats vote in REPUBLICAN PRIMARIES.
Thassit!
PERIOD.
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