“Scaring Away Black Voters In Mississippi”: Misinformation Is Already Circulating As To The Details Of The Law Voters Must Follow
Several right-wing groups have banded together to form a “voter integrity project’ in response to the news that Senator Thad Cochran is courting black Democratic voters in his runoff with the Tea partier Chris McDaniel.
The Senate Conservatives Fund, Freedom Works and the Tea Party Patriots, all political action committees, will “deploy observers in areas where Mr. Cochran is recruiting Democrats,” according to a Times article. Ken Cuccinelli, the president of the Senate Conservative Funds, said these observers would be trained to see “whether the law is being followed.”
Does anything think this “project” will actually encourage voter “integrity” as opposed to voter suppression? Misinformation is already circulating as to the details of the law that voters must follow.
As The Times noted, anyone can vote in a Republican runoff if he or she did not vote in the Democratic primary. Conversely, anyone who did participate in the Democratic primary may not vote in the Republican runoff.
But J. Christian Adams, a former lawyer for the Department of Justice known for pushing a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, told Breitbart, the conservative news site, that the rules are actually much stricter. In an email to the conservative news site he said that “if someone doesn’t intend to support the nominee in November, then that person isn’t allowed to vote in the Republican primary.”
In other words, a voter’s future intentions matter as much as their past actions.
To support Mr. Adams’s position, Breitbart cited a 2007 decision by U.S. District Judge W. Allen Pepper, which appears to indicate that Republican Party representatives may seek to discover whom voters intend to support in the fall, and potentially challenge their right to cast a ballot on those grounds.
The Supreme Court determined in a 2005 case that the First Amendment ‘protects the right of political parties to associate with fellow members and disassociate with non-members,’ Judge Pepper wrote in his opinion. So technically it’s the party’s responsibility—i.e., in this case, state GOP chairman Joe Nosef’s responsibility—to protect GOP voters’ First Amendment rights by working to keep Democrats from voting in the GOP primary runoff.”
The thing is, Breitbart left out a key detail. As Rick Hasen pointed out on his Election Law Blog, the 2007 district court decision “was reversed and remanded” a year later. The upshot is that “poll workers may not challenge a voter, despite that voters past history of voting for Democrats unless the voter comes in and ‘openly declares that he or she does not intend to support the nominees of the party.’”
The plan to send “election observers” will, in itself, sound familiar to anyone who knows the history of voter intimidation in the South. The particular danger here is that even well-intentioned observers, primed for a flood of black Democrats and confused on the details of Mississippi law, will think it’s acceptable or even expected to take aside black voters and pepper them with questions.
By: Juliet Lapidos, Editors Blog, The New York Times, June 23, 2014
“GOP Civil War?”: More Like Petty Wrangling Over Infinitesimal Ideological ‘Distinctions’
Mississippi primary voters just could not decide whether they wanted to nominate a very conservative Republican or a very conservative Republican for the US Senate.
Very nearly 50 percent of Tuesday’s primary voters favored a right-wing stalwart who opposes abortion rights and marriage equality, supports restrictive Voter ID laws, promises to oppose minimum-wage hikes, rips “Obamacare,” the IRS, the EPA and OSHA and trashes “entitlement” programs.
Very nearly 50 percent of Tuesday’s primary voters favored another right-wing stalwart, who opposes abortion rights and marriage equality, supports restrictive Voter ID laws, promises to oppose minimum-wage hikes, rips “Obamacare,” the IRS, the EPA and OSHA and trashes “entitlement” programs.
But Mississippi Republicans couldn’t quite get to a majority opinion about which conservative was conservative enough. So with virtually all the votes counted (and with a tiny percentage of the total streaming off to a little-known third candidate), the good Republicans of the Magnolia State appear to have decided to have another go at it—setting up a June 24 runoff that will require several more weeks of wrangling over what to most Americans will seem to be infinitesimal ideological “distinctions.”
That’s the thing to remember about the fabulous imagining that there is a meaningful difference between “establishment Republicans” and “Tea Party Republicans.”
Yes, there are stylistic distinctions to be noted between incumbent Senator Thad Cochran, a relatively distinguished senior senator, and state Senator Chris McDaniel, a relatively undistinguished challenger who says his campaign “had nothing to do with this sad incident” where a conservative blogger photographed the incumbent’s bedridden wife. Yes, the two Republicans now appear to be set for a high-profile runoff race that will be portrayed as a “GOP civil war” over emphasis and approach.
But that does not place them anywhere near the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.
Cochran is identified as the “establishment” choice, which means he is favored by the US Chamber of Commerce and the CEOs and Wall Street financiers who support its campaign to elect a Senate that will rubber-stamp a wildly pro-corporate agenda.
McDaniel is identified as the “anti-establishment” Tea Party insurgent, which means that he is favored by the Club for Growth and the CEOs and Wall Street financiers interests who support its campaign to elect a Senate that will rubber-stamp a wildly pro-corporate agenda.
For the most part, this year’s supposedly significant Senate contests between the establishment and the “Tea Party” have explored the range of opinion from what would historically have been understood as the right wing of the Republican Party to what is now understood as the right wing of the Republican Party.
Some very wealthy people take these distinctions very seriously. They have money to burn, and they are burning it up this year on political purity tests that pit those who like their economic and social conservatism straight against those who want it with a twist of Ted Cruz.
This has already made for an expensive race in Mississippi. Roughly $8 million in outside spending has been lavished on the state’s television stations—in addition to big spending from the Club for Growth, Citizens United and the Tea Party Patriots for McDaniel and big spending from the Chamber and the National Association of Realtors for Cochran. The race has seen $1.1 million spent by “Senate Conservatives Action” for McDaniel and $1.7 million spent by the “Mississippi Conservatives” super PAC for Cochran.
Confused? Don’t be.
McDaniel is a conservative.
And so is Cochran.
Despite the theater-of-the-absurd campaign, it is even more absurd to suggest that Cochran is a liberal with a Southern accent. Mississippi is not in the habit of populating the Senate with progressives. The incumbent’s latest US Chamber of Commerce rating is 100 percent, while his National Education Association ranking is zero. Cochran’s latest ACLU rating is zero, while the American Security Council Foundation has got him at 100 percent. Cochran gets 100 percent from the National Rifle Association and he’s at zero with the American Association of University Women. His latest rating from the National Right-to-Life Committee is 100 percent, while NARAL Pro-Choice America has him at zero—as does the latest assessment from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
It is true that Cochran has, on rare occasions been a reasonable player. But those are pretty much the same rare occasions when Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, another Tea Party target this year, has chosen not to follow Cruz off whatever deep end the Texan might be approaching. Usually, what passes for reasonableness is a vote to take care of some pressing home-state business—such as, in Cochran’s case, specific support for disaster assistance after hurricanes hit the Mississippi coast and general enthusiasm for military spending that keeps Mississippians employed.
That may make Cochran insufficiently “pure” for the purists.
But it is not a distinction that the vast majority of Americans need bother with, unless, of course, they really do imagine that Thad Cochran and Mitch McConnell are liberals.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, June 4, 2014
“Magnolia Melee”: This One Could Be A Mystery Right Down To June 3
There will be eight states holding primaries on June 3, the largest number of the year. But there are only two holding one of the competitive GOP Senate primaries that are the talk of the cycle. And with Joni Ernst increasingly looking like a sure winner (either in the primary or in a subsequent state convention) in Iowa, the big contest is the one where for some time now handicappers have figured the Tea Party folk have the best chance of beating a Republican incumbent, in Mississippi.
Insults from activists notwithstanding, it’s hard to call Thad Cochran a RINO with a straight face. He has a lifetime rating of 79% (over six terms in the Senate) from the American Conservative Union, and a 72% lifetime rating from the Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity. He’s been endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee, as well as by such mainline conservative groups as the U.S. Chamber.
But he’s not one to indulge much in conservative fire-breathing, and he belongs to an older generation of conservatives who saw no problem with getting as much out of the federal budget for a very poor state like Mississippi as possible. As a senior appropriator (and ranking GOP member of the Ag Committee, still important to big growers in Mississippi), he’s done his job. He’s also 76 years old, and has been in Congress since 1972.
So like Richard Luger in 2012, Cochran was an obvious target for an ideological purge, and the biggest of the right-wing outside groups, the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund, have heavily invested in Chris McDaniel, a state legislator and former nationally syndicated conservative radio talk show host. Citizens United is about to join the crusade with some late ads.
There’s been relatively little polling on the race, but there is evidence McDaniel has been gaining on or even moving ahead of Cochran, who has the support of the very conservative State GOP leadership, including Gov. Phil Bryant and former Gov. Haley Barbour. Nobody quite knows how or whether to factor in the bizarre incident that’s been unfolding since Easter, when a “constitutional conservative” blogger close to the McDaniel campaign took pictures of Cochran’s disabled wife in a nursing facility as part of an effort to suggest he’s having an affair with a staff member. Nobody’s proved the McDaniel campaign had any involvement beyond telling the blogger to take down the offensive post when it briefly appeared. And normally in cases like this you’d think the underlying smear would get out there and do some damage even it purveyor was discredited. On the other hand, nobody’s going to much believe that Cochran, insofar as he is not Strom Thurmond, is some sort of septuagenarian lothario.
Barring some reliable late polling, this one could be a mystery right down to June 3. Since Cochran isn’t likely to have a personality transplant and start shrieking about The Welfare or Common Core like the Chamber’s candidates in North Carolina and Georgia, this could be a true and interesting test of whether a state whose Republican voters are both atavistically conservative and heavily dependent on Uncle Sugar will vote their furies or their needs.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 22, 2014
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