State Sen. Chris McDaniel’s ultimately unsuccessful 2014 GOP primary challenge against longtime Sen. Thad Cochran was one of the craziest races we’ve seen in heavily Republican Mississippi, and we may be getting a sequel. McDaniel tells Breitbart that he’s “definitely considering” a primary bid against Sen. Roger Wicker, arguing that Wicker and the rest of the state’s congressional delegation have been silent “[r]ather than championing conservative reform in D.C.”
Back in 2013, McDaniel announced that he would run for the Senate whether or not Cochran sought a seventh term, and he immediately earned support from important tea party-aligned groups like the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund. Cochran had always been a reliably conservative senator, but his long tenure, occasional bipartisan actions, and success getting appropriations for his state made him a tempting target. Cochran also hadn’t faced a real fight in decades and started with little money, and he never really seemed to understand the direction his party was heading in. Cochran had the support of the state GOP establishment and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but McDaniel won a little more than 1,400 votes in the first round of the primary. McDaniel fell just short of the majority he needed to win outright, but Cochran looked doomed in the runoff three weeks later.
However, Cochran ended up pulling off a surprising 51-49 win. Unlike many Southern GOP senators, Cochran had a good relationship with black voters in his state, and his campaign encouraged them to back him in the GOP runoff. The unusual strategy worked to McDaniel’s chagrin; the state senator and his allies insisted that Democratic voters had illegally voted in the GOP primary and demanded a new election. Since Thad Cochran is sitting in the Senate right now and Chris McDaniel isn’t, you can guess how well that went.
If McDaniel challenges Wicker, he will likely have a much tougher time getting traction. Wicker just came off a stint chairing the NRSC, so he should have all the connections he’ll need to raise money. Perhaps more importantly, Wicker has had contact with the far-right forces that Cochran ignored for years. Wicker doesn’t have the type of relationship with black voters that Cochran had, but it’s a lot less likely that he’ll be relying on them to save his career. There’s also no guarantee that McDaniel will run: Last cycle, he expressed interest in challenging Rep. Steven Palazzo in the primary, but ended up sitting the race out.
Still, there’s one big orange x-factor out there. Wicker doesn’t seem to have alienated Donald Trump, but if that changes and senator finds himself on the wrong end of some nasty tweets, he could get a lot more vulnerable. And while McDaniel backed Ted Cruz in the presidential primary, his ties to neo-Confederate groups and sexist rhetoric (during his radio career, McDaniel uttered such gems as "It's so interesting to see this woman basically using her boobies to—I shouldn't have said that—using her breasts to run for office") make him almost a perfect Trump stand-in. Mississippi hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since the early 1980s and that’s unlikely to change regardless of who wins the GOP primary, but the inflammatory McDaniel would still be worth keeping an eye on in a general election in a good Democratic year.