After coming close to toppling Sen. Thad Cochran in the 2014 GOP primary, state Sen. Chris McDaniel has been flirting with challenging Roger Wicker, Mississippi’s other Republican senator. McDaniel said back in March that he hopes to decide in October, but Wicker’s team is out with a late April poll from Public Opinion Strategies urging him not to bother. The survey gives Wicker a 55-30 lead, including a 47-37 edge with “strong Republicans favorable to the tea party.”
As we’ve noted before, Wicker looks to be a much tougher opponent than Cochran was for McDaniel. While Cochran dithered about whether to seek re-election and began his eventual campaign with relatively little money, Wicker has already kicked off his bid for another term and had $2 million in the bank at the end of March. But more importantly, while Cochran was loathed by tea partiers, Wicker doesn’t seem to have made any real enemies in the GOP.
The Clarion-Ledger's Geoff Pender also argues that McDaniel squandered the chance to be a major figure in the state GOP after his narrow 2014 loss to Cochran. McDaniel spent months trying to overturn Cochran’s primary win (and as far as we know, he has yet to acknowledge he lost), and Pender writes that in the process, he “likely burn[ed] up some political capital along with financial capital.” McDaniel also didn’t do much to try and extend his influence in state politics afterwards. The state senator did not play much of a roll in the 2015 state legislative primaries, and he “was about as effective and dynamic as his chair in the state Senate this legislative session.” Ouch.