After last night's STOLEN election in the Mississippi runoff, Harry Enten ran the numbers that we have to go on thus far, and the evidence is clear:
After calculating the demographic differences between the June 3rd primary and last night's runoff, as well as the last presidential election, it becomes even clearer that Cochran’s vote increases were correlated to the percentage of black Democrats who live in each county. So the racebait worked! Dan Riehl also took note:FiveThirtyEight: We’ll need to look at the profiles of the individual voters, post-election surveys and precinct-level data. Until then, we have county-level results to go on, and that data suggests that traditionally Democratic voters provided Cochran with his margin of victory.
On L, Cochran v McDaniel - RT, Romney v Obama. Cochran won Obama land, lost on GOP turf cc @htmldon @FordOConnell pic.twitter.com/TwLb1sFbJ4
— DanRiehl (@DanRiehl) June 25, 2014
Enten also ran regressions, separating all those new black Democratic votes from the runoff, while keeping the demographic turnout constant from the first round, and the results are as the polls had predicted...
The result: Cochran loses a lot of votes. Instead of Cochran winning the runoff by 2 points, or about 6,000 votes, he loses by a little less than 8 points, or about 25,000 votes. He drops about 40,000 votes from his 190,000 vote total, while McDaniel loses only about 15,000 from his 185,000 vote total. ...This evidence should be used by the McDaniel camp to demand either a recount or seek legal action, or even more effectively to seek a new election.
Now, you may be saying to yourself that Cochran going from a win by a little less than 2 points to a loss by a little less than 8 points seems like a pretty big shift. I agree. I stress again that a county-by-county examination is inexact. We need to get more data to be sure of why Cochran won. (And that data should be coming if you’ll just sit tight. Patience is as helpful a skill in interpreting politics as it is in practicing it.)
Keep in mind, though, that the pre-election polls had McDaniel ahead by around 8 points. It seems plausible that the reason they got the race wrong was because they were modeling an electorate that looked a lot more like the first round of the GOP primary instead of the runoff. That certainly makes sense given what I found. The analysis here suggests that Cochran may very well have won because he was able to get traditionally Democratic voters to cast their ballots for him.
If those options are stripped from the table, then the next approach would be to run as a write-in candidate. Remember, the establishment candidate in Alaska, Murkowski, retained her Senate seat with just such a strategy.
Related links: McDaniel's non-concession speech: "Before this race ends, we have to be absolutely certain that the Republican Primary was won by Republican voters!"WT: The head of tea party group said Wednesday that state Sen. Chris McDaniel should wage a write-in campaign in the November election after losing to Sen. Thad Cochran in a nasty Mississippi primary race.
Judson Phillips, the vocal leader of Tea Party Nation, an online group that backed Mr. McDaniel in the race, said that Mr. Cochran and his allies made it abundantly clear in the contest that the “RINO wing” of the Republican party will do whatever it can to stay in power — in this case by reaching out to Democrats.
“When the Republican Establishment acts like Democrats, what is the point of supporting them?” Mr. Phillips said in an early morning email blast. “The answer is, we don’t have to.
“Every McDaniel supporter in Mississippi from DeSoto County in the North to Biloxi in the South should stand up today and tell Chris McDaniel that if he runs as a write-in candidate in November, they will support him,” he said.
As it stands, Mr. McDaniel refused to concede the race, saying he wants to make sure the “sanctity” of the vote is upheld and that the race was decided by Republican voters.
Report: Cochran Win “Almost Entirely Attributable To A Large Turnout Among Black Voters” – Update: Pic Of Race Baiting Flyer That Got Cochran Elected
RUSH: I Wonder If Thad Cochran’s Campaign Slogan Was “Uncle Toms for Thad”
Thad Cochran's Coalition of the Lied To
McDaniel Learns that Racism Alive and Well in Mississippi
UPDATE: A write-in campaign may not be possible after all...
NewsMax: Mississippi tea party activists have taken to social media to urge state Sen. Chris McDaniel to keep up the fight against Republican Sen. Thad Cochran by mounting a November write-in campaign.
Write-ins are only permitted under narrowly defined circumstances not met in this case, according to The Clarion-Ledger.
McDaniel may not be able to challenge Cochran again in November because he missed the qualifying deadline to run as an independent. "Candidates can either qualify as a Democrat or Republican via the appropriate state party or as an independent by collecting the requisite number of signatures and filing with the Secretary of State's office," according to the Clarion-Ledger.
Write-in ballots are possible only if a candidate already on the ballot dies, according to the newspaper.
