Time To Pay The Piper, Sen. Cochran

Unbiased Political News
Republican challenger Chris McDaniel beat Cochran in an earlier primary race.  However, because he failed to get at least 50% of the vote, McDaniel was forced into a run-off against Cochran. Normally, Mississippi’s Democratic voters of the African-American persuasion couldn’t have cared less about the winner of any Republican primary.  However, when McDaniel publicly showed his true stripes by making some rather racist remarks, black voters decided to vote across party lines and help Cochran across the finish line.  It wasn’t that they wanted Cochran in — they just wanted McDaniel out!

Cochran won the primary only with the assistance of African-American voters.  Now, civil rights leaders in the South are openly asking Cochran to repay the favor by leading the charge in the Senate to renew a key section of the Voting Rights Act struck down last year by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

“But for the Voting Rights Act, those African-Americans who turned out to the polls … to support his re-election would not have had the opportunity to do so,” said Mississippi NAACP President Derrick Johnson.  He is 110% right!

Unbiased Political News
Black Mississippians, who traditionally vote overwhelmingly Democratic, have never before been such a key voting bloc in a contested GOP contest.  Cochran now has the daunting task of figuring out how to fulfill the request from black voters who handed him his victory, while mending relationships inside Mississippi’s GOP, which is predominately white.

Interestingly, McDaniel has shown himself to be a sore loser by filing a claim of voter irregularities.  He is arguing that Cochran only won because “liberal Democrats” cheated by double-voting in the June 3 Democratic primary and then again in the Republican runoff 3 weeks later.  Although he has threatened to file an official claim “any day now,” McDaniel has yet to present any tangible evidence of voter fraud.

McDaniel’s claims are just 1 more twist in an election that affirms politics in Mississippi and surrounding Southern states is still all about race, even a half century after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.