Cochran Asking Blacks to Rescue Him in Republican Primary

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Cochran Asking Blacks to Rescue Him in Republican Primary
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/u...390C7EEFFB2E1EFF545&gwt=pay&assetType=nyt_now

Bishop Ronnie C. Crudup stood before roughly a dozen of his colleagues at a weekly Baptist fellowship meeting last week and asked for their help in a fight that, until now, would have been unthinkable for a black pastor in Mississippi: “Let’s send Senator Thad Cochran back to Washington,” he urged.
That Senator Cochran is a Republican and African-Americans here are overwhelmingly Democratic did not go unmentioned. But, Mr. Crudup noted with a wry smile, “in tough times, you’ve got to do some unusual things.”

And if that meant supporting Mr. Cochran against State Senator Chris McDaniel in a Republican runoff on Tuesday, it was worth the risk. Mr. Cochran had helped Mississippi’s blacks during his six terms, Mr. Crudup said, and it was now time to repay him with their support in the political fight of his life, especially against an opponent who was known to have made racially insensitive remarks when he was a talk-show host.

“You’ve got to be willing to cross the line sometimes, and go over to some strange places for our interests,” said Mr. Crudup, the senior pastor at New Horizon Church International.

It is a remarkable political science experiment, and it also may be the only path to victory left to Mr. Cochran. But after being narrowly edged out by Mr. McDaniel, 41, in the Republican primary earlier this month, Mr. Cochran, 76, needs to expand the number of voters who will show up for the runoff, which is open to any Mississippi resident who did not vote in the Democratic primary. The winner on Tuesday will face former Representative Travis Childers, a conservative Democrat, in November.

“We’ve got efforts reaching out to black voters in Mississippi who want to vote for Thad because they like what Thad is for,” said Austin Barbour, a Cochran campaign adviser. “Thad Cochran is someone who, even with his conservative message, represents all of Mississippi. He’s not some hostile screamer.”

But to many, the outreach seems like a long shot. Asked whether he could ever have imagined the possibility that African-Americans could play a defining role in a Republican race in a state where the two political parties are divided by race, Representative Bennie Thompson shook his head in disbelief. “If someone had told me that it would, I’d tell them they were on something,” said Mr. Thompson, a Democrat and Mississippi’s sole black member of Congress.

Mr. McDaniel and groups supporting him portray Mr. Cochran’s effort as an act of desperation, but they frame their argument in partisan rather than racial terms. “The idea that he would have to reach out to liberal Democrats in an effort to save his candidacy just shows how far to the left he’s gone over the past 42 years,” said Mr. McDaniel, who has run an anti-Washington campaign fueled by Tea Party support.

When it was pointed out that the question was about African-American voters, he replied, “It has nothing to do with that — this is about liberal Democrats.”

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The Cochran outreach campaign is taking many forms. The “super PAC” supporting the senator, Mississippi Conservatives, is paying African-American leaders, including Mr. Crudup, to help lift black turnout on Tuesday, said Pete Perry, a Republican strategist here who is working for the group.

“We’re working with a whole bunch of different folks, and Crudup is one of them,” said Mr. Perry, noting with a chuckle that his introduction to the church-based black politics of the South has been “a real education.” Mr. Perry declined to say exactly how much Mississippi Conservatives was paying to increase African-American turnout but said “sure” when asked whether it was in the five-figure range.

Another group, All Citizens for Mississippi, paid for an advertisement that ran in two black-oriented Jackson newspapers and highlighted Mr. Cochran’s work for African-Americans. The group lists Mr. Crudup’s church as its address.

For its part, Mr. Cochran’s campaign denies paying any “walking-around money” to black community leaders.

Mr. Cochran’s television commercials are not subtle about their intentions: Video clips of African-Americans interacting with the longtime senator blanket the airwaves. The images are aimed at a bloc of the electorate rarely seen inside precincts for Republican primaries — let alone runoffs, which typically see even lower turnout.

“It’s something different,” deadpanned State Senator Willie Simmons, a black Democrat who is backing Mr. Cochran.

Mississippi, with its painful history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, may have the most racially polarized electorate in the country. Blacks make up a higher percentage of the vote here than in any other state — 36 percent in 2012, according to exit polls. But they are so overwhelmingly Democratic that they remain nearly invisible in Republican politics. Just 2 percent of Republican primary voters in 2012 were African-American.

The difficulty for Mr. Cochran next week, many black politicians noted, is that while Mr. Cochran has received some African-American support in previous re-election bids, those ballots have been cast in the privacy of a general election voting booth. Walking into a Republican polling place is a far different thing.

“Whether they can cross over from a traditional Democratic habit to vote one time for a Republican, I just don’t know,” said former Representative Mike Espy, who in 1986 was the first African-American elected to Congress from Mississippi since Reconstruction. “I don’t know whether the black community can do that, but this is a reasonable suggestion.”

Some of Mr. Cochran’s supporters and some top black Mississippi Democrats say the suggestion is indeed reasonable because the senator is not an ideological firebrand and has used his status as a senior member of the Appropriations Committee to deliver projects to Mississippi. Mr. Simmons, who represents a largely black district in the Delta, reeled off the money that Mr. Cochran had secured for health centers, historically black colleges and infrastructure.

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“He has been able to do a lot of good for the state of Mississippi,” said Mr. Simmons, who said his efforts for Mr. Cochran were entirely voluntary. “He did not have to ask me, I told him I was supporting him.”

Mr. Thompson, whose district stretches from black neighborhoods here in the capital to the Delta in the west, would not go that far. But he made clear that he was not discouraging his supporters from backing Mr. Cochran, and he expressed concern about what Mr. McDaniel’s victory would mean for the poorest state in the country.

“Our state relies very heavily on the understanding that support from Washington is essential,” Mr. Thompson said. “For a person to run counter to that support is a threat to where we are now as a state.”

On the other side, a radio ad by the Club for Growth, a conservative group supporting Mr. McDaniel, argues that Mr. Cochran wants Democrats to “hijack the Republican runoff.”

If Mr. McDaniel and his allies prefer euphemisms when it comes to a charged issue like race, so does Mr. Cochran. In an interview during a campaign stop at a cafe in an affluent part of Jackson, Mr. Cochran said that he’s “cared just as much about one part of our state as the other.”

“I think we do better when we have a broad base of people that can attract voters from every sector, whether they’re rich or poor or working class, well-educated, not so well-educated,” he said.

Mr. Cochran’s challenge in reaching black voters was evident as he stumped last week before crowds that were almost entirely white. Talamieka Brice, 33, a small-business owner in Ridgeland, Miss., was one of the few African-Americans in the crowd. She said she had not been impressed by either campaign’s outreach to African-Americans but planned to vote for Mr. Cochran in the runoff — in part because Mr. McDaniel’s focus on “Mississippi values” worries her.

“Traditionally, things that have been associated with Mississippi values and what the state stands for are things that are not good for minorities,” she said. “That scares me.”