A Growing Role For Blacks In Republican Politics?

The Mississippi Republican Senate primary has been strange from beginning to end. From reports of supporters of state Sen. Chris McDaniel sneaking into the nursing home bedroom of incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran's wife to take photos, to the discovery of McDaniel supporters being locked in a courthouse on primary night that was storing and counting ballots, the levels of miscues, shenanigans and gaffes this one election held gave many the feeling that this entire situation was scripted for laughs.

However, the most unbelievable part of this election cycle, for many, was the vote itself. In the original primary election, McDaniel won the plurality of votes, stunning many and suggesting that the Tea Party will get its second major win this year - following Dave Brat's shocking defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. McDaniel, however, failed to win an absolute majority, forcing a runoff against Cochran. Last minute exploitation of Mississippi's open primary law - which allows Democrats to vote in Republican primaries if they did not already vote in a primary that year - gave Cochran the win.

This has prompted an avalanche of strife and controversy. McDaniel, who feels that he won the majority of Republican votes and refuses to concede, has launched a statewide campaign to find incidents of double-voting - Democrats who voted in both the Republican and Democratic primaries. Should McDaniel find more irregularities than Cochran's margin of victory, he can force another run-off.

The Federal Election Commission has sent a Request for Additional Information - the preliminary step in an inquiry - to Mississippi Conservatives, a super PAC supporting Cochran's re-election bid. The FEC feels that the super PAC may have failed to file a required 24-hour report regarding 'last-minute' independent expenditures totaling $15,000. There was also the Cochran press call, that ended abruptly when a heckler twice asked about the Cochran campaign 'harvesting black votes' like cotton. Information on how to log into the press call and a call to action to crash it was tweeted by Charles Johnson, a conservative blogger and Cochran campaign-critic.

Finally, there is the allegation raised by Johnson that the Cochran campaign bought black votes for $15 each. Johnson paid the Rev. Steve Fielder, a pastor at the First Union Missionary Baptist Church in Meridian, Mississippi, to participate in an interview in which Felder alleged that he was instructed by the Cochran campaign to seek out pro-Cochran votes from his parishioners. Fielder showed Johnson text messages - allegedly from a Cochran staffer - to support his claims.

While all of this can be attributed to the dust and fury that can be expected by an intra-party fight - especially among conservatives, who feel betrayed by the mainstream's embrace of the opposition in order to exclude them from the power-share - something significant happened in regards to Republican/black relations in the South. As it could be said that the soliciting of the black Democratic vote by Cochran - a moderate mainstream-voting Republican - represents a 'devil's bargain' from both ends of the conversation, it also represents an opportunity.

It can be argued that Cochran couldn't win without the black vote and that black voters were voting for the lesser of two evils - McDaniel campaigned on cutting federal aid to Mississippi, one of the poorest states in the Union, which would have instantly placed large swathes of the black community in dire straits. Still, this represented the first significant participation of blacks in Southern Republican politics in recent memory.

With almost all of the Southern states having open primary laws similar to Mississippi, the active campaigning to black voters may be the key for Republicans toward permanently defeating the Tea Party primary threat. In return, as the Republicans would be actively currying the black vote, the black community would have more of a say in state- and national-based politics - in which the Southern black community has traditionally been unable to collate power or significant influence.

'My hat is off to Sen. Cochran for being as desperate as he was, to actually go out and, up front, go out and ask for those votes,' Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia told Politico following the run-off election. 'Those votes were delivered, and I'm hopeful he will be responsible and responsive to the voters that pushed him over the top.'

The black community has every reason to be distrustful of the Republicans, considering the history of extreme racism that, in some pockets of the South, continues to this day. However, the black community has a limited impact in the otherwise solidly Republican Mississippi - the black community constitutes less than 35 percent of Mississippi's population, but represents the largest concentration of blacks in the nation. While it may not be possible to challenge the establishment in a state like Mississippi, it may be possible to influence it.

While Cochran has yet to address his obligation to the black community, or even if he perceives himself as having an obligation, many are hoping that Cochran's example was not just an act of desperation, but a roadmap toward the Southern Republicans embracing the black community in years to come and a better future for all.

'Thad Cochran represented an opportunity to vote against times past,' said Rep. Bennie Thompson. 'I think what McDaniel represented to a lot of black people who observed the race is a time past. And for so many of those individuals who suffered in the times past, they were not about to see that happen again.'

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