Alabama and Mississippi are both conducting congressional primaries tonight. Here's a look at the key races in both states. Polls close at 8 PM ET, so be sure to come back for our liveblog.
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• AL-01 (R): Five-term Rep. Jo Bonner is facing a primary challenge from businessman Dean Young, who's loaned his campaign about $200K of his own money for the race in this strongly Republican district. In addition, the very strange new super PAC known as the Campaign for Primary Accountability, which targets incumbents of both parties simply for the crime of being incumbents, has spent some cash here. While an upset would be extraordinary, this race could be an interesting measure of anti-incumbent sentiment.
• AL-05 (R): Turncoat chump Parker Griffith first won election to this seat in 2008 as a Democrat. A year later, he switched parties, and a few months after that received a classic tea party welcome: He lost badly in the Republican primary to Madison County Commissioner Mo Brooks, who went on to a comfortable win in November in this very red seat. Despite being reviled by both sides, Griffith somehow had the bright idea to try to seek his old seat back—and amazingly, has funneled over half a million dollars from his own bank account into his campaign coffers. Back in January, an unanswered Brooks internal poll showed the incumbent prevailing by a beyond-comical 71-14 margin. While that was before Griffith went on his spending spree, it seems impossible to imagine him being any more popular with GOP voters than he was two years ago.
• AL-06 (R): This race is probably the biggest opportunity to see an incumbent get knocked off on Tuesday night. Rep. Spencer Bachus has served the 6th for 10 terms, but it's a hard district to live up to: As the reddest in the nation, Bachus's merely very conservative voting record probably isn't good enough. What's more, he's made a lot of headlines lately over the fact that he's been accused of buying and selling stocks based on non-public information he was privy to as a member of Congress—that is, insider trading.
The guy challenging Bachus is a real piece of work, though: state Sen. Scott Beason. Beason is best-known for getting caught calling black Alabamians "aborigines"—on a wire he himself was wearing on behalf of the FBI! That investigation turned out to be an utter shitshow, though: A judge hearing the case ruled that Beason only helped the feds as a means to advance his own political agenda, saying he "lack[ed] the integrity expected from elected officials." In any event, Beason hasn't raised a ton, but as in the AL-01 race, the Campaign for Primary Accountability has dropped some coin here, even airing some ads on his behalf. It might just be enough to usher Beason to victory, as it did for Republican Brad Wenstrup, who beat Rep. Jean Schmidt in OH-02 last week with the CPA's help.
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MS-01 (R): While not an especially notable race, former Eupora mayor Henry Ross has spent five figures to go on the air attacking Rep. Alan Nunnelee in this safely Republican seat. I point this out because Nunnelee is the only freshman on this list, and he has felt the need to run TV ads of his own, so it'll be interesting to see how pissed off Republican voters already are at the class of 2010.
• MS-02 (D): It's a pretty common theme to a lot of primaries this year: Long-time member of the Congressional Black Caucus faces younger upstart in a heavily Democratic, heavily African-American district. In this case, veteran Rep. Bennie Thompson is dealing with a challenge from former Greenville mayor Heather McTeer, who is almost 30 years his junior. McTeer hasn't raised much, and Thompson, who has almost never had a competitive race, went into the contest with a lot of money in the bank. But McTeer did go on TV in the waning days of the campaign, and there are plenty of reasons to imagine that Thompson might be rusty. Still, a McTeer win would be a major upset.
10:25 AM PT: One important detail to note is that both Alabama and Mississippi send the top two finishers from any race where one candidate fails to score a majority of the vote to a runoff. (In MS, that's April 4, and in AL, it's on April 24.) There's a good chance of this happening in AL-06 in particular, where a number of minor candidates are on the ballot and could preclude Bachus (or, less likely, Beason) from getting 50%+1.