'The worst race-baiting ads I've ever seen': Radio ads in Mississippi senate race accused tea party candidate of Ku Klux Klan links and drove black Democrats to vote against him in a REPUBLICAN primary

Radio ads exclusively obtained by MailOnline show how forces loyal to Sen. Thad Cochran used claims of racism to get black Democrats to cross over and cast primary run-off votes against a tea party Republican

Ads were paid for by a far-left former marketing executive, and sources say the funds were provided by a super PAC created by former Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour

The middle-woman is a preacher and former adviser to Atlanta's mayor who was forced to resign her political post last year after she filed untruthful financial disclosures

The ads, heard for the first time here, claim that if Cochran's tea party challenger, Chris McDaniels, were to win the primary, poor black Mississippians would lose food stamps and other government benefits



A series of three racially charged radio ads that ran in rural Mississippi on Election Day played a role in driving black Democrats to vote in a Republican primary run-off election. MailOnline has exclusively obtained audio of the ads.



They were broadcast 48 times in a 12-hour period Tuesday on WMGO-AM radio in the town of Canton, and urged black Mississippians to cross party lines and support GOP Sen. Thad Cochran in his smash-mouth contest against tea party insurgent Chris McDaniel.



Each carried a required acknowledgement stating that it was 'paid for by Citizens for Progress.' Clerks at the office of Mississippi's secretary of state told MailOnline that no such group is registered there as a political committee.



The Federal Election Commission also lacks any registration from a group with that name.



Politics in America's Deep South is historically a full-contact sport replete with its own tradition of dirty tricks, but the radio ads indicate a level of race-baiting that is rarely seen in twenty-first century U.S. politics.

SCROLL DOWN TO LISTEN TO THE EXPLOSIVE ADS

Pastor Mitzi Bickers, a former senior staffer to Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, resigned her city hall job in 2013 after filing false financial disclosures about her political work; she's now in the middle of a scheme to drive black Democratic voters to participate -- some of them illegally -- in Tuesday's Republican U.S. Senate primary run-off

U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran appears to have won a tight primary race for a seventh term in Congress by leveraging 'crossover' votes motivated by racially incendiary radio ads Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel is reportedly set to challenge the election results by showing that thousands of Democrats illegally voted in the GOP primary run-off on Tuesday after they voted in their pwn party's primary on June 10

They claimed that supporters of conservative McDaniel had connections to the Ku Klux Klan and that McDaniel had a 'racist agenda.' They also warned that black Democrats 'could lose food stamps, housing assistance, student loans, early breakfast and lunch programs and disaster assistance' if he were to become the Republican U.S. Senate nominee.



'Vote against the tea party. Vote Thad Cochran,' one ad said. 'If the tea party, with their racist ideas, win, we will be sent back to the '50s and '60s.'



MailOnline has learned that 'Citizens for Progress' is tied to a longtime Democratic political operative who was paid $44,000 to run racially explosive 'robocalls' in the same race.



A political action committee founded by former Republican National Committee chair and former Republican Gov. Haley Barbour made those payments.



The calls were placed in predominantly black and Democratic regions of the state during the final days before Tuesday's runoff, according to a political operative in Mississippi.



Mitzi Bickers, an Atlanta pastor and former president of the Atlanta school board, used the same nonexistent group name – 'Citizens for Progress' – in a 2013 campaign for a local sales tax proposal.



After it was reported that Bickers filed a fraudulent financial disclosure report related to the campaign, she resigned her post as a senior adviser to Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed.



The political 'super PAC' that paid her to run the robocalls is called Mississippi Conservatives, according to National Review.



Haley Barbour, the former governor, founded the PAC, which is now run by Henry Barbour, his nephew.



Henry Barbour denied any knowledge of the three radio ads, but acknowledged to MailOnline that his organization had paid Bickers for the phone call campaign.



'We hired Mitzi Bickers to do paid phones,' he said Friday via email. 'If she had something to do with radio ads, I am unaware of it and was not involved with radio ads in Canton.'



'It's time to take a stand and say no to the tea party, the call's script read. 'No to their obstruction, no to their disrespectful treatment of the first African-American president.'



Bickers did not respond to repeated phone calls seeking comment.



One of the radio ads was first surfaced online by opposition researcher Charles C. Johnson, a McDaniel supporter and tea party advocate whose Twitter feed is a one-stop shop for conservatives who claim widespread voter fraud delivered Cochran a victory from the jaws of defeat.

Johnson also first obtained a recording of the robocalls, which used some of the same language as the radio ads – including the claim that Chris McDaniel would cut funding for federal programs favored by Democrats in predominantly black regions of Mississippi.



Cochran, a six-term senator appeared to beat McDaniel on Tuesday by about 6,600 votes, out of more than 370,000 ballots cast. The two were locked in a run-off following a June 3 primary contest in which McDaniel led by 1,400 votes but neither man won 50 per cent.



Carol Stern, a left-leaning former marketing executive, paid a Mississippi radio station to run racially charged ads that helped torpedo a tea party candidate in a Republican primary run-off

Carol Stern's one-person marketing company paid with this check for the ads to run on a black community radio station in Canton, Mississippi CROSSOVER: The Facebook feed of Carol Stern, the marketer who paid for the racial ads in a Republican primary, is full of progressive messages and links to far-left blogs

About 61,000 more people voted in the run-off than in the original primary contest, marking the first time in 30 years that a rematch created more interest than the contest it followed.



Most of that increase was seen in pockets of the deep-red state that are dominated by heavily black Democratic constituencies.



The groundswell of voter participation was largely due to a get-out-the-vote strategy that saw tens of thousands of registered Democrats crossing party lines to cast ballots for the Republican Cochran – mostly in protest votes aimed at knocking his tea party opponent out of the race.



The tactic is legal in Mississippi, as long as those protest voters didn't already cast ballots in the Democratic primary three weeks earlier.

'They say they’re going to fight the liberals in Washington, but they embraced the liberals in Mississippi just to win the election,' McDaniel told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday night.

'It’s the worst style of politicking I can imagine.'



'All Citizens for Mississippi,' a political committee that didn't legally exist before it produced that distributed literature like this flier, is one of the shadowy groups behind the cesspool-like politics in the Cochran-McDaniel fight

James 'Scooby Doo' Warren, a longtime Democratic political operative, told the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger on June 17 that he was directing a 'get-out-the-vote' plan that included the robocalls.



He was working, Warren said, with Mississippi Conservatives, the same Haley Barbour-related PAC that funded Mitzi Bickers to produce the racially explosive robocalls. It's not clear whether he was involved with the radio ads.



Warren also said he was working closely with Bishop Ronnie Crudup Sr., a clergyman whose church created a separate political action committee called 'All Citizens for Mississippi.'



That group paid to produce and distribute pro-Cochran fliers in African-American neighborhoods, including one that claimed 'the tea party intends to prevent you from voting.'



A full-page ad the group ran in a black community newspaper in Mississippi stated that 'we're asking Democrats to cross over and vote in the Republican primary.



The New York Times reported that All Citizens for Mississippi didn't legally exist when that ad was run, but only filed its first report with the Federal Election Commission later.



McDaniel's campaign hasn't conceded Tuesday's election, and political observers expect him to officially challenge the results on Friday or Monday.



His supporters have flooded across the state to pore over polling-place records, identifying Cochran voters who double-dipped by casting ballots for a Democrat on June 3 and for Cochran on June 24.



Facebook pages and Twitter feeds serving as informal clearinghouses for angry tea partiers now feature claims that between 5,000 and 15,000 such voters were identified in the first 48 hours after the polls closed Tuesday evening.



If true, the result could be thrown out and a special election called in July – the third contest pitting the two Republicans against each other in barely a month.



Mississippi's strong built-in Republican majority virtually guarantees that the Republican who ultimately emerges from the scrum will win in November's general election.



MailOnline obtained audio of the three radio ads from a source at WMGO radio who also provided a copy of the check used to pay for them to air on Tuesday.



Political consultant and marketing adviser Carol Stern signed the check, drawn on the account of her one-woman business, C. Stern Strategic Marketing.



She offered a terse 'I have no comment' when reached by email on Wednesday.



Stern was until recently a vice president at G. Williams Marketing, Inc., a Ridgeland, Mississippi blue chip firm whose client base includes KFC, McDonald's and Burger King.



According to two Mississippi-based political consultants to spoke to MailOnline on background, the Williams firm commissioned the anti-McDaniel ads, .



George Williams, the company's founder and CEO, denied involvement with the racially incendiary ads.



'That's not correct,' he claimed, but conceded that he had placed similar ads at the same radio station for 'my client, Ronny Lott, who is running in Madison County.'



Reached for comment, WMGO-AM station manager Jerry Lousteau said that two ads his station ran for Lott, a candidate for chancery clerk in Madison County, Mississippi, and the three for a group advocating against McDaniel, all came from Williams' firm.



Another radio station source said Williams paid directly for the Ronny Lott ads, but that his former vice president Stern covered the cost of the anti-McDaniel spots.



Stern's Facebook page is replete with stories from the far-left Daily Kos website, a curious fact for an operative who bought ads in a Republican primary run-off.



Money man: Henry Barbour, whose Uncle is former GOP Gov. Haley Barbour, runs the super PAC that funded Mitzi Bickers, but he denies knowing anything about her peeling off funds to pay for radio ads

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, also a onetime chairman of the Republican National Committee, set up the super PAC that funded race-tinged robocalls and allegedly paid for the radio ads through third-party Mitzi Bickers

MailOnline also obtained exclusive audio of the two Ronny Lott ads. They feature the same voice actor from the anti-McDaniel ads. Lousteau said they were created at the same recording studio, Fernandez Creative.



A sound engineer, he said, called the radio station several times during a single recording session with questions about both sets of ads.



Recording studio owner Sergio Fernandez did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment.



The ads targeting the tea party candidate McDaniel, said Lousteau, were 'some of the worst race-baiting ads I've ever seen in this business. Really bad stuff.'



Asked about Williams' denials, he told MailOnline it was par for the course in Mississippi.



'It doesn't surprise me that people are going to want to hide from this, because that's always the way it is,' he said. 'The candidates want plausible deniability. They go, "I don't know who's – you know, that's a third party".'



'They say they don't know, and that's usually a lie,' Lousteau explained. And the same with George Williams.'



'He's already trying to wriggle away.'



The Mississippi race was seen as a potential sequel to a June 10 Virginia primary contest that saw Republican Rep. Eric Cantor, then the U.S. House's powerful majority leader, swept aside by politically unknown economics professor Dave Brat.



The prospect of Cochran meeting the same fate motivated his loyal political machine to shift into overdrive.



The race has also seen its share of tragedy.



Attorney Mark Mayfield, vice chairman of the Mississippi Tea Party, committed suicide on Friday.



He was charged along with two other men in an alleged plot to photograph Cochran's bedridden wife in her nursing home, and briefly using the pictures in a political video that would target the senator

