50 years after Freedom Summer, Mississippi senator courts black votes

Fifty years after Freedom Summer, when thousands of young white northerners descended upon a violently segregationist Mississippi to help register African American voters, a septuagenarian son of the south is now counting on black turnout as his last line of defense against a loss to conservative primary challenger in a special runoff election.

When 76 year-old Republican Thad Cochran first took a seat in the U.S. Senate, Jimmy Carter, another white southerner, was president. Carter, a Democrat, had won the presidency in part due to strong support from blacks, continuing a transformation in the American electorate that began with FDR, and accelerated with the passage of sweeping civil rights laws in the mid '60s and the "southern strategy" employed by the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon.

When three civil rights workers were murdered outside Philadelphia, Mississippi in June 1964, their Klan-connected murderers were also largely connected to the Democratic power structure that dominated state politics. Cochran was a young law student at Ole Miss that year, but even 8 years later, when he first won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives (with the help of a strong showing in his district by President Nixon), Cochran was only the second Republican since Reconstruction elected to represent Mississippi in the House.

In 1978, when Cochran was first elected to the Senate, he replaced a six-term Democrat and became the first member of the Mississippi GOP elected to statewide office in a century.

Cochran's public life bridges the transition from a Democratic "solid south," as it was called, to a south today that is nearly solid Republican. But as with the rest of the south, that now dominant GOP vote in Mississippi is overwhelmingly a white one. Roughly 90 percent of African American voters in the Magnolia State vote Democratic; more than 80 percent of white voters routinely cast ballots for Republicans. Those numbers hold true in statewide elections, regardless of the race of the Democratic candidate.

But Mississippi is a state that (with some caveats) allows crossover voting in primary elections, and if a voter did not already cast a Democratic ballot in the June 3 primary, he or she can vote in Tuesday's Republican runoff. And it is in this race where incumbent Senator Cochran is now turning to African Americans in a last-ditch effort to best ultra-conservative challenger Chris McDaniel.

McDaniel, a state senator and former rightwing talk radio host, actually garnered about 1,500 more votes than Cochran in the first round, but fell short of an absolute majority, thus necessitating the runoff. In the ensuing weeks, sparse polling shows McDaniel, who has the backing of the Tea Party Patriots and the Senate Conservatives Fund, pulling away from Cochran.

The Senator has the support of almost the entire GOP establishment, but in a year where a slow economic recovery and anti-tax interest groups work hand-in-hand to fuel anger at the federal government, those kinds of endorsements can cut both ways.

The same could be said of Cochran's latest play for crossover voters. African Americans made up 36 percent of Mississippi's electorate as of 2012 — the largest percentage in the nation — and with the engaged, activist white vote that will dominate this low-turnout special election tilting toward the younger, louder McDaniel, Cochran is hoping to do something that might have, frankly, gotten him killed 50 years ago: increase black turnout.

The incumbent's strategy will not, in 2014, finish up quite so dire, but it is a gamble that could end his political life. For even though overt racism might play a less obvious role, Cochran risks alienating even more of his traditional conservative base with his open appeal for Democratic votes. The McDaniel campaign has accused Cochran of pandering to "liberal Democrats" (pointedly, the campaign has avoided framing this in racial terms), and supporters of the challenger are pledging to field "poll watchers" to preserve, as they say, "ballot integrity."

If that sounds a tiny bit dodgy in a state that required a national mobilization and strong federal legislation to break the white supremacist hold on electoral power a half-century ago, it should. Poll watchers were a standard part of voter intimidation practices prior to passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and versions of the practice continue in southern and northern precincts alike where primarily Republican poll watchers seek to intimidate minority voters. After the Supreme Court gutted parts of the VRA in 2013, poll watchers coupled with new voter ID laws pose an even greater threat of voter suppression.

If that is in any way troubling to the McDaniel campaign, they haven't said so. And if Cochran, who has enjoyed a small amount of African American support in the past, finds his position ironic, he's keeping it to himself. But Cochran adviser Stuart Stevens, speaking to the Christian Science Monitor, couldn't keep history completely out of the picture. “I’m old enough to remember the way things used to be," said Stevens, "I’m from Mississippi. More people voting is a good thing."

But as the sun rises on runoff day, few seem to think Cochran can expand the electorate enough to overcome McDaniel's surge. Perhaps more engrossing than the final result — and even more important than the Wednesday-morning tea-leaf reading that will no doubt attempt to again proclaim a winner in the perceived match race between GOP officialdom and the tea party diaspora — will be how the senior senator's electoral Hail Mary plays out in microcosm at post Voting Rights enforcement Mississippi polls, and how ghosts of the old south will further influence the macrocosm of the national Republican Party come November and beyond.