Lately I've had mixed feelings about Nate Silver's predictions about the U.S. Senate races but this I can agree with FiveThirtyEight.com that Senator Thad Cochran (R. MS) is the GOP incumbent most likely to lose his primary bid to a Tea Party challenger:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/...
As The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin reported, incumbents have mostly avoided strong primary opponents through a combination of political skill, strong fundraising and a newfound recognition by outside groups that winning back the Senate may be easier if they don’t help knock out current senators. Still, I’d argue that the lack of strong challengers has mostly to do with the ideology of the incumbents. Most safe senators are conservative; Cochran is more moderate.
Cochran was more moderate than 85 percent of the Republican caucus in the 112th Congress (2011-2012), according to DW-nominate scores, which use roll call votes to classify representatives and senators along a liberal-to-conservative spectrum. Among Republicans running in 2014, only Sen. Susan Collins is to Cochran’s left, and Collins represents a far more liberal state, Maine. Among Republicans in solid-red states, only Alexander of Tennessee, at 79 percent, was close to Cochran. The rest fell mostly in the middle or middle right of the Republican caucus.
Ideology has been closely linked with a senator’s chances of losing or nearly losing a primary. Since 2002, the average endangered senator was more moderate than 89 percent of his caucus. Only one, Utah’s Bob Bennett in 2010, lost despite being in the conservative wing of his caucus. Bennett was more conservative than 82 percent of his GOP colleagues. But Bennett lost in a convention, rather than a primary; conventions tend to be more favorable than primaries to the poles of a party. - FiveThiryEight.com, 4/7/14
I'm not surprised that Cochran would be the top GOP incumbent to be defeated this year in the primary. He's been getting hit with attack ads:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/...
Cochran is facing a primary challenge by state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-MS), a tea party favorite who has the backing of a number of high-profile conservative outside groups including the Senate Conservatives Fund and Club for Growth, but has also been getting negative attention for his ties to white supremacist groups.
A recent poll by Anzalone Research commissioned by the Democratic Party found McDaniel leading Cochran 44 percent to 43 percent, within the survey's margin of error. But another recent poll, by NSON Strategies, found Cochran leading McDaniel, 45 percent to 37 percent. - TPM, 4/7/14
But whether or not McDaniel beats Cochran, the Tea Party has already won:
http://atr.rollcall.com/...=
A seven-week gauntlet of Republican Senate primaries kicking off next month will decide the fate of the tea party’s success this year.
If a Republican senator loses a primary this year, it will more than likely occur in a span of nominating contests premiering in one month. Incumbents got the boot thanks to tea-party-backed hopefuls in both 2010 and 2012, and those lesser known Republican nominees went on to both triumphs and failures.
In the third election cycle since the rise of the tea party, fundraising and organization remain significant hurdles for anti-establishment candidates. The outside groups helping to fuel many of the primary campaigns concede they are realistic about their slim chances against incumbents and mainstream Republican candidates.
Still, tea party organizers said they remain hopeful about picking off a few House seats and perhaps a couple Senate seats in their continued pursuit of increased congressional influence.
“Some of our guys could lose, many of them could lose. We understand that,” said Daniel Horowitz of the Madison Project, which recruits and supports conservative candidates. “We take calculated risks. We want to see a path, but it’s very much an uphill path in many of these races, especially if you’re going up against an incumbent and even some of the open seats where you’re starting out with a lot less money.”
But, Horowitz added, “on a large scale we have already won by forcing most of the incumbents to embrace, at least publicly, many of our policies.” - Roll Call, 4/7/14
But a lot is riding on this race for the Tea Party:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Polls show a close race two months before the June 3 Republican primary, and an army of Tea Party activists are canvassing Mississippi voters for McDaniel. Money has flooded in, with national Tea Party-affiliated groups such as Club for Growth spending close to $1 million to support him.
For the Tea Party, the stakes in McDaniel's race are huge. If it can unseat a popular incumbent like Cochran, it can claim relevance within the Republican Party even though setbacks elsewhere indicate the movement that burst into American politics in 2010 is losing some momentum amid a backlash from the more moderate Republican establishment.
Since Cochran, 76, was first elected to the Senate in 1978, he rarely has faced a significant challenge and has not needed the type of broad fundraising effort that is typical of Senate campaigns today.
With help from the national groups, McDaniel, 41, has closed the fundraising gap between himself and the incumbent in a way that few Tea Party challengers have been able to. He raised nearly $500,000 during the fourth quarter; Cochran brought in $740,000 for the entire year.
Mississippi seems an almost ideal state for a challenge such as McDaniel's. It is a small state with only about 3 million people, a manageable landscape for an upstart campaign. It also is a hotbed of Tea Party activism: According to Gallup polling, only Wyoming is more conservative.
Cochran's strength is rooted in his familiarity to voters and in his ability to bring federal dollars for military projects and other programs to a state that U.S. Census Bureau figures indicate has poverty rates among the nation's highest and personal incomes among the lowest. The senator's supporters also point to federal aid Cochran helped secure for Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
McDaniel and other fiscal conservatives in the Tea Party movement describe the Cochran largesse as the kind of "pork" spending that is driving the United States deeper into debt.
McDaniel has acknowledged that he probably would have voted for the popular $10 billion Katrina aid package that Congress approved for Gulf Coast states, but has said some of the money was misspent.
Republican strategist Ford O'Connell says McDaniel's primary challenge will have ramifications for the Tea Party well beyond Mississippi, especially when it comes to fundraising.
"These conservative groups need Thad Cochran's head on their mantle if they want to remain credible with donors," O'Connell said. "And the Tea Party movement badly needs a shot in the arm to fire them up for the election." - Huffington Post, 4/1/14
And the Mississippi Republican party is afraid of having McDaniel as their candidate:
http://www.slate.com/...
On Wednesday afternoon the conservative blog Y'all Politics posted a kind of scoop. Chris McDaniel, the Republican challenger who has posed a serious threat to Sen. Thad Cochran all year, was scheduled to speak at Firearm Freedom Day in (wait for it) Guntown, Miss. Two other Republican legislators, Melanie Sojourner and (wait for it again) Bubba Carpenter, would be there too. But among the vendors was a group called Pace Confederate Depot. This might not have raised hackles with the rest of the press—not in a state whose flag incorporates the stars and bars—but blogger Alan Lange, a donor to Cochran, did some homework.
Based in Baldwyn, Mississippi, Pace Confederate Depot is your home for all things confederate including . . . “White Pride” merchandise. It gets worse.
Brian Pace, lead proprietor of Pace Confederate Depot (as well as the Confederate Patriot Voters United), is a self-avowed “racial preservationist” and has publicly declared interest, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in creating a separatist “white state”.
The national press caught on. TPM's Daniel Strauss reported out the story, interviewing Brian Pace, who did not do much spinning. "If you feel like segregation is what you want to do then that's your freedom of association," he said, "that's your constitutional right." (It isn't, but we can move on.) This helped nobody, least of all McDaniel, who quit the event. Pace lacked the sense of the Citizens Militia of Mississippi, which keeps up a website that aggregates terrifying news for gun owners and Christians but opens with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. (It's a way of getting to the point that "Obama and his fellow political hacks are running roughshod over our Constitution and steadily tearing down the foundations of our way of life that gave America her greatness.") - Slate, 4/3/14
And if McDaniel is the nominee, it could make the race competitive, especially against this guy:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Travis Childers (U.S. Senate, Mississippi): The former congressman was once the toast of the national Democratic Party, winning a key special election in a strongly conservative Mississippi district in 2008. He lost in 2010, and there was little fanfare when he entered the race against Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) earlier this year. But if state Sen. Chris McDaniel can upend Cochran in the GOP primary, don’t count Childers out. He’s got the kind of profile Democrats need to win in the Deep South – provided he gets some help, of course. - Washington Post, 4/4/14
And with a candidate like McDaniel, despite his flaws, he can rile up the base:
http://yallpolitics.com/...
The Tea Party candidate who is challenging Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) promised to "kill" ObamaCare, if he gets elected in November.
"We are not going to stand with an eye toward trying to place a Band-Aid on ObamaCare," Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel said at FreePAC Kentucky, a conservative gathering in Louisville on Saturday. "We're not going to fix it. We're going to kill it." - Y'all Politics, 4/5/14
And Cochran knows he's in for a real fight and he's not taking anything for granted:
http://www.politico.com/...
Sen. Thad Cochran’s re-election campaign on Monday went up with the Mississippi Republican’s first negative hit on GOP primary opponent Chris McDaniel in one of 2014’s most competitive primaries.
The 30-second spot, titled “Don’t Know,” skewers McDaniel over remarks he made to POLITICO earlier this year, concerning his philosophy on government assistance and whether he would have supported disaster relief funding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated portions of the state. He initially said he didn’t “know enough” about the Katrina bill, but would “probably” have supported it; McDaniel’s campaign later clarified that he would have backed the measure.
“That’s the same Chris McDaniel who’s promising Mississippi voters that ‘I’m not going to do anything for you,’” the ad says, referencing the same article. “Sounds crazy, but Chris McDaniel is backed by powerful interests that Gov. Haley Barbour calls ‘out-of-state phonies.”
The ad, airing statewide, is funded at “a high level,” according to the Cochran campaign.
“If Chris McDaniel won’t do anything for Mississippi, why should Mississippians do anything for Chris McDaniel?” the spot asks. - Politico, 4/7/14
Stay tuned.