Free Republic

JONES COUNTY, MS - About one dozen Pine Belt residents carried signs and American flags and waved at vehicles from an overpass on Interstate-59 Saturday to protest illegal immigration. They were part of a National Day of Protest organized on social media by the "Make Them Listen" movement. Folks from Petal, Pearl River and Jones counties displayed signs such as "Secure the Border" and "No Amnesty" as they stood on the overpass at the Hattiesburg-Laurel Regional Airport exit. "The border is not secure and we're being invaded," said Darlene Thomas, one of the organizers of the protest. "It's not a...

PPP's new Mississippi poll find Thad Cochran has a strong advantage for the general election- but that the fallout from last month's divisive runoff has left a lot of voters undecided. Cochran's at 40% to 24% for Democrat Travis Childers and 5% for Reform Party candidate Shawn O'Hara, with 31% of voters still undecided. Cochran's emerged from the primary popular with Democrats (58/22 approval) and unpopular with Republicans (39/52). Cochran is particularly well liked by African Americans, sporting a 59/20 approval rating, and even narrowly leading Childers with them at 37/36. Cochran is only polling at 48% among GOP voters...

Hillary Clinton thanked the Republican establishment and its big business allies for taking on the Tea Party and defeating conservative candidates like Chris McDaniel in Mississippi's June runoff.

The prolonged aftermath of the Mississippi runoff in which Thad Cochran edged Chris McDaniel has produced schisms within the Republican National Committee and even in another state’s GOP. Is Chris McDaniel a modern-day Don Quixote tilting at windmills or is he a brave warrior, fighting to the last, for a just cause? Either way, the tea party candidate’s protracted battle against six-term Sen. Thad Cochran (R) of Mississippi has deepened the split in an already divided Mississippi Republican Party – and is spreading further into the national GOP. More than three weeks after state Senator McDaniel lost his primary runoff...

Even in the bitterly fought primary battle between Mississippi senator Thad Cochran and his challenger, state senator Chris McDaniel, some of the radio ads that aired against McDaniel were considered especially incendiary. One charged that a McDaniel victory would set back “race relationships between blacks and whites and other ethnic groups.” Another warned that his campaign was part of an attempt to “roll back the hand of time.” The political-action committee that aired the ads raised eyebrows from the outset.

Mississippi Power is looking for ways to make a positive economic impact as the Kemper Coal Plant is slowly nearing its finish line. The facility has completed construction and is now in the process of testing its equipment. And coal engineers say as they begin, they're doing their best to hire locally. "We sign long-term contracts with our customer," mine engineer Matt Jones says. "We've got a 40-year contract with Mississippi Power for this operation. We're part of the community, and we want to make sure we're hiring our neighbors as much we can." At its peak, the coal plant...

HARRISON COUNTY, MS (WLOX) - WLOX News has learned that Chris McDaniel's campaign will not have access to Harrison County poll books. The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected McDaniel's petition for a court order to demand that Harrison County Circuit Clerk Gayle Parker release poll books from the June 24 Republican Party primary runoff election. The court ruled that there is no legal requirement that poll books be included in the contents of ballot boxes. The order released on Thursday said poll books should be considered official records of all persons qualified to vote in a particular county and should be...

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS and PHILIP ELLIOTT July 16, 2014 JACKSON, Miss. — Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's political machine paid to turn out the black vote for Republican Sen. Thad Cochran's re-election bid, according to campaign finance reports. His vanquished rival insisted that was improper and said Wednesday that a legal challenge to the loss remained likely in the next 10 days. Barbour, a political giant in his state and a favorite of national donors, backed Mississippi Conservatives and his nephew Henry Barbour was a top official there. Mississippi Conservatives sent almost $145,000 to All Citizens for Mississippi, a...

Mississippi attack ads that painted conservative Republicans and tea partiers as racists were funded by Senate Republicans, RedState editor-in-chief Erick Erickson has confirmed. Advertisements by All Citizens for Mississippi, which attacked state Sen. Chris McDaniel and painted conservatives as racists, were partly funded by Sens. Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Rob Portman, Bob Corker and Roy Blunt, RedState reported. According to documents filed with the Federal Elections Commission, All Citizens for Mississippi received funding from a Haley Barbour-backed group called Mississippi Conservatives.

Phil Harding, a 30-year Air Force veteran and Chris McDaniel supporter who helped run the June 24 primary runoff election in Harrison County, Mississippi, said he witnessed key documents being discarded and that a large volume of absentee ballot envelopes and applications are missing, making them unavailable for review by McDaniel´s campaign. However, another poll worker involved, a member of a local Harrison County GOP Executive Committee and Cochran supporter Frank Bordeaux, provided a significantly different account of the episode, saying the documents weren´t discarded. Harding´s account is included in a lawsuit from election integrity group True The Vote, which...

Why Mississippi matters to the GOP’s future By Sal Russo - 07/14/14 08:08 PM EDT If the recent Mississippi Senate primary was a GOP establishment bellwether, the Republican Party is in deep trouble. By resorting to a disingenuous and morally bankrupt campaign to win at all costs, the establishment exposed itself to be into politics only for the power. In order to grow the GOP and consistently win at the ballot box in November, Republicans need to start earning votes with conservative ideas, not government handouts. Since the Republicans’ dismal showing in the 2012 elections, party leaders have been working to...

McDaniel asks state high court to open records By JEFF AMY July 14, 2014 Read more here: http://www.sunherald.com/2014/07/14/5698657/mcdaniel-asks-state-high-court.html?sp=/99/100/&ihp=1#storylink=cpyJACKSON -- U.S. Senate challenger Chris McDaniel is taking his quest to view original voting records to the Mississippi Supreme Court. McDaniel asked Monday for an emergency order forcing Harrison County Circuit Clerk Gayle Parker to let him see original copies of poll books. He's trying to prove people who voted in the June 3 Democratic primary illegally voted in the June 24 Republican runoff won by incumbent U.S. Sen Thad Cochran. Cochran finished with a 7,667-vote margin of victory, according to official...

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) is back with his colleagues in Washington, D.C., after winning his hard-fought primary runoff — but he had a bit of trouble finding Senate Republicans' weekly luncheon on Tuesday. Cochran, while talking with The Hill, made a few wrong turns before accidentally ending up at Senate Democrats' luncheon. After exiting a Senate elevator on the wrong floor, Cochran and The Hill reboarded. He then found the right floor but turned away from the Senate GOP luncheon, a few yards from the elevator, to stroll in the opposite direction, arriving at the Democrats' weekly gathering a few...

The plaintiff in a landmark campaign finance case is asking Mississippi to investigate allegations of election fraud in that state’s Republican primary between Sen. Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel. Shaun McCutcheon —an Alabama GOP donor, tea party activist and the victorious original plaintiff in the 2014 Supreme Court that bears his name — has filed a complaint with the Mississippi secretary of state arguing that Democratic crossover voters in the June primary are guilty of a misdemeanor under state law. “It appears thousands of people who apparently voted in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate on June 3, 2014, were...

The Republican Senatorial primary in Mississippi exhibited an over-the-top abuse of power, showing how the accumulation of one party political power corrupts the entire system. Upon the death of Mark Mayfield, an attorney who had been arrested and charged with felony conspiracy for supposedly telling blogger Clayton Kelly how to access Rose Cochran’s room in a nursing home, I began to look into how that ridiculous incident had gotten so out-of-hand. During the primary, I watched as Bradley Dayspring, communications frat-boy of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), made such a big deal about the arrest of the men that...

In June Senator Thad Cochran won the GOP primary runoff election over conservative challenger Chris McDaniel after 25,000-35,000 Democrats helped push him to victory. Cochran and the Republican establishment also were behind the racist anti-Tea Party ads that ran in Mississippi prior to the runoff election. Thad Cochran won the election over Chris McDaniel by 6,880 votes in the June 24 runoff.

A Mississippi man who accused the Thad Cochran campaign of paying African-Americans to vote for the senator in his primary runoff last month is walking back his story. Stevie Fielder told California-based blogger Charles C. Johnson he was asked to buy votes for $15 a pop in the June 24 runoff between Cochran and state Sen. Chris McDaniel. Now, he's saying he never paid anyone to vote, saying the conversations he claimed he had with Cochran campaign staffers Kirk Sims and Amanda Shook were "hypothetical" and the interview with Johnson was edited.

However, since the election, the McDaniel campaign quickly found 1,000 examples in one county of Democrats who voted in the June 3rd primary as Democrats and then crossed over into the Republican primary this week. This is illegal and their votes should not be counted. The Chris McDaniel for Senate campaign identified multiple Mississippi counties where this occurred. McDaniel supporters were barred from reviewing voter rolls in nine Mississippi counties. On Thursday True the Vote, the nation’s largest voter integrity organization, filed a lawsuit against the Mississippi Republican Party for destruction of absentee ballot documents, double voting and discarded legal...

Sen. Thad Cochran's victory over state Sen. Chris McDaniel in the Mississippi GOP runoff can most likely be attributed to the African American and Democratic turnout, The New York Times reported. Cochran defeated McDaniel by 7,667 votes in a June 24 GOP runoff. About half of those votes came from heavily Democratic precincts. An analysis of 25 Mississippi precincts where President Barack Obama won at least 99 percent of the vote in 2012 showed that Cochran's vote total increased from 148 to 1,619. Obama voters who took part in the runoff backed Cochran 20 to 1. "The data strongly suggests...

No doubt, Haley Barbour and his political machine do not want to lose their foothold in the state of Mississippi. And, no doubt, state Sen. Chris McDaniel and many of his Tea Party supporters can do, say and believe distasteful, disturbing things. Not to mention, if Sen. Thad Cochran were to lose his seat, Mississippi could lose a lot of federal money. #None of that makes the disturbing ways elections are often run in Mississippi above scrutiny. It's almost as if tradition—that's the way it's always been done—is an excuse for turning our heads away from shadowy PACs and the...