Free Republic

JACKSON, Miss. — U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran won the state's Republican primary runoff over challenger Chris McDaniel by 7,667 votes, according to a certification made by the state Republican Party and submitted to the Secretary of State on Monday, the legal deadline. The result was wider than the 6,800-vote win counted by The Associated Press after the June election. Tallies usually change as county parties examine provisional ballots and finalize results....

Democrat black reverend, who brought “hundreds” to the polls for promise of payment, exposes alleged massive voter fraud, vote buying operation by Cochran campaign. A black reverend stiffed by the Cochran campaign has exposed an alleged criminal conspiracy by Cochran staffers to commit massive voter fraud ahead of Tuesday’s controversial U.S. Senate Republican runoff election in Mississippi. Reverend Stevie Fielder, associate pastor at historic First Union Missionary Baptist Church and former official at Meridian’s redevelopment agency, says he delivered “hundreds or even thousands,” of blacks to the polls after being offered money and being assured by a Cochran campaign operative...

Conservative election integrity organization True The Vote filed suit in federal court Tuesday against Mississippi’s Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann and the Mississippi Republican Party, asking a judge for an immediate injunction against them so that the election material from the state’s June 24 GOP primary runoff can be inspected. The lawsuit comes as allegations that Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) campaign and his allies engaged in voter fraud to win last Tuesday’s runoff against conservative state Sen. Chris McDaniel. Cochran bested McDaniel by fewer than 7,000 votes but did so with an overwhelming turnout from liberal Democrats in the black...

One week after traveling to Mississippi to do his utmost to help Senator Thad Cochran (R) beat Tea Party rival Chris McDaniel, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) talked about the strengths he saw in Cochran's approach to campaigning. According to AZ Central, McCain dismissed criticism over the tactics the Republican Establishment used to get black Democrats to cross over and vote for Cochran. Said McCain, "There are some people complaining that African-American voters voted. [But] I thought one of the major priorities of the Republican Party was to get all minority and ethnic voters out to vote for Republicans." He described...

Chris McDaniel, the tea partyer who nearly beat Sen. Thad Cochran in Tuesday's Mississippi primary runoff, still hasn't conceded. Analysts say he's damaging his future.Chris McDaniel came within a few thousand votes of being the next Ted Cruz. Now, two days after his stunning loss in Mississippi’s high-stakes GOP Senate runoff, Mr. McDaniel risks ruining a potentially bright political future, say both Mississippi and national political observers. The charismatic, tea party-backed state senator, who took on six-term Sen. Thad Cochran in the marquee primary of 2014, has still refused to concede the race, claiming “voter irregularities.” Thursday afternoon, McDaniel’s campaign...

The Daily Mail has obtained three racially-charged radio ads placed by organizations that worked to help incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) stage his come from behind run-off victory this week. [The ads] claimed that supporters of conservative McDaniel had connections to the Ku Klux Klan and that McDaniel had a ‘racist agenda.’ They also warned that black Democrats ‘could lose food stamps, housing assistance, student loans, early breakfast and lunch programs and disaster assistance’ if he were to become the Republican U.S. Senate nominee. ‘Vote against the tea party. Vote Thad Cochran,’ one ad said. ‘If the tea party,...

Mark Mayfield, a Mississippi tea party leader and lawyer facing charges in connection with taking photos of Sen. Thad Cochran’s wife at her nursing home apparently committed suicide Friday morning. Police said that Mayfield’s wife, Robin, called 911 just after 9 a.m. to say her husband had shot himself. Officers arrived to find the 57-year-old lying on the floor of a storage room in his garage with a single gunshot wound to the head and a “large caliber revolver” with the body. Lt. John Neal of the Ridgeland Police Department told POLITICO that there was a note recovered, but he...

Democrats were crossing their fingers that Chris McDaniel would be the Republican nominee in Mississippi. But since Sen. Thad Cochran has prevailed, they are trying to do the unthinkable — unseat a six-term GOP senator. McDaniel supporters are irate that Cochran won a GOP primary by reaching across the aisle. Now some of his backers are ambivalent about whether they’ll come out at all in November — and if they don’t, that could create a rare opening for a Democrat here.

A tea party official charged with conspiring to take photos of U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran’s wife inside a nursing home apparently committed suicide Friday, police said, days after Cochran won a nasty Republican primary.

Sarah Palin and right-wing Republicans are calling "shenanigans" over the Mississippi U.S. Senate race this week. (Full disclosure: Whenever someone uses that hokey phrase, I chuckle and think of the "South Park" episode when third-graders denounced ripoffs at a local carnival). Anyway, here's what happened in the Magnolia State, which isn't quite as funny. Establishment GOP U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran bucked the odds and history after a narrow primary loss to Tea Party favorite Chris McDaniel. On Tuesday, the six-term incumbent edged McDaniel in a runoff, buoyed by heavy turnout from African-Americans. The Cochran campaign openly courted these traditionally Democratic...

*Radio ads exclusively obtained by MailOnline show how forces loyal to Sen. Thad Cochran used claims of racism to get black Democrats to cross over and cast primary run-off votes against a tea party Republican *Ads were paid for by a far-left former marketing executive, and sources say the funds were provided by a super PAC created by former Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour *The middle-woman is a preacher and former adviser to Atlanta's mayor who was forced to resign her political post last year after she filed untruthful financial disclosures *The ads, heard for the first time here, claim...

Or maybe we should call it the ‘Barbour machine’. According to NRO and the FEC, Haley Barbour’s nephew paid a couple of ‘get out the vote’ groups in Atlanta, via his SuperPAC, for ‘phone services’. These local groups are affiliated with a black pastor who is also a Democratic staffer and political strategist and it seems she may have been the key to getting out the black vote for Cochran: She is, from all appearances, something of a renaissance woman: She is not only the pastor of Atlanta’s Emmanuel Baptist Church but also a former president of the Atlanta school...

UNE 27, 2014 Meet Mitzi Bickers A scandal-plagued Democratic operative worked the black vote for Cochran By Eliana Johnson Meet what appears to be one of the keys to Thad Cochran’s black-turnout operation, Mitzi Bickers. She is, from all appearances, something of a renaissance woman: She is not only the pastor of Atlanta’s Emmanuel Baptist Church but also a former president of the Atlanta school board, a former construction-company executive, and a Democratic staffer and political strategist with a checkered past. Last year, she left her job as a senior adviser to Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed after news surfaced that...

WHO PAID FOR RACE-BAITING FLIER IN MISSISSIPPI? Smear of Tea Party and McDaniel needs investigation. By Jeffrey Lord Who paid for it? Who will investigate it? Who will apologize for it? “It” being the flier distributed in the Mississippi Senate GOP primary, as seen here, whose headline reads: "The Tea Party intends to prevent blacks from voting on Tuesday." The flier says that the Tea Party uses the word “Democrats” as “code” for blacks. In short? Somebody out there in Mississippi put out a race-baiting flier to smear both Thad Cochran’s Tea Party opponent Chris McDaniel and the Tea Party...

(Reuters) - A prominent leader of the Mississippi Tea Party who was arrested in connection with photos posted online of U.S. Senator Thad Cochran's bedridden wife died on Friday of an apparent suicide, the man’s lawyer said. Mark Mayfield, 58, was vice chairman of the Mississippi Tea Party and a Central Mississippi Tea Party chairperson, according to those organizations' websites. "This is a terrible tragedy that shouldn’t have happened," Mayfield's lawyer John Reeves told Reuters. Mayfield was one of three men accused last month of conspiring with a blogger who was charged with taking photos of Cochran's bedridden wife in...

Coming into Tuesday's runoff election in Mississippi, polling suggested that incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran was at a major disadvantage. As we noted, there was a big question mark hanging over any predictions because it wasn't clear what turnout would look like.In part, that was because the Cochran campaign was explicitly targeting black voters to come out to vote, despite those voters usually voting Democratic. Now, of course, we know what happened. Counties with a higher black population voted more heavily.

Sen. Thad Cochran’s second-round primary victory may be nullified if Chris McDaniel’s team can show the margin of victory was less than the number of people who wrongly voted in both Democratic and GOP primaries. “It’s tedious, but it is a simple task [to check and] Mississippi state law is very clear on this,” said Bill Pascoe, a political consultant for Independent Women’s Voice, which backed McDaniel. Last July, the mayoral election for the state’s fourth largest city, Hattiesburg, was nullified after the losing candidate showed that the 37-vote margin of victory was smaller than the pool of suspect absentee...

The Chris McDaniel campaign has identified multiple Mississippi counties in which enough improper ballots have been cast that a legal challenge to the outcome of the election is warranted.

It is obviously karma that Haley Barbour is equipped with looks that resemble Ned Beatty from the “purty mouth” scene in the movie Deliverance - or perhaps his portrayal of the corrupt Senator in the movie Shooter. Given that the former head of the Republican National Committee and Mississippi Governor will evidently wallow in the excreta and politically copulate with just about anyone, it’s appropriate. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen Barbour and Beatty in the same room. Has anyone? Consider: Haley’s Mississippi mafia has spent the past three weeks verifying Barbour’s electoral promiscuity in his hysteria to...

National Republican leaders are toasting primary season as a smashing success over activist conservatives that has put the hard right on the ropes and given the Washington GOP the slate of candidates it wanted for 2014. Those victories, however, have come at a staggering cost — and Republicans are painfully aware of the price of putting down an intraparty insurrection. Establishment-aligned groups have already spent some $23 million on independent expenditures propping up favored House and Senate candidates in contentious primaries, according to a POLITICO review of Federal Election Commission records. By comparison, Republican nominees raised and spent that amount...