For the Mississippi Senate race’s local importance the spectacle almost defies geography. Mississippi carnival: Palin vs. Favre

MADISON, Miss. — Ladies and gentlemen, the circus has come to Madison County.

As the wild Republican Senate runoff here tumbles to a climax next week, what began as a bare-bones campaign against Sen. Thad Cochran has bloomed into a full-blown political carnival. Insurgent conservative Chris McDaniel, once viewed as a gadfly state legislator propped up by a lonely pair of well-funded national groups, is now at the center of a colorful and unwieldy activist entourage scrambling to grab a piece of his anticipated success.


The names and faces crowding around McDaniel would be familiar to voters in any number of political battlegrounds, lending a “Wizard of Oz”-like quality to the race. If a voter woke up in the last few days of the election, they’d look around and find all the familiar staples of conservative TV and talk radio arrayed before them: Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum are here. And there’s Ron Paul! And — could that be Chuck Woolery, too?

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The former Alaska governor, Pennsylvania senator and Texas congressman, as well as the cheeseball ex-game show host, are all part of the activist road show that has rolled through state after state in the tea party era. It’s the same rogues gallery that flocked to Indiana for the 2012 nomination fight between moderate Sen. Dick Lugar and upstart Richard Mourdock; many of the same little-funded groups and C-list political celebrities rushed to Missouri two years ago to dig in behind Todd Akin’s doomed Senate campaign. They have descended upon Mississippi only in the last few weeks, as McDaniel’s campaign has taken on unmistakable momentum.

For all the Mississippi Senate race’s local importance — it may reorder Mississippi’s relationship with Washington and has already shaken the state’s GOP power structure — the spectacle unfolding here almost defies geography. It is not just a Mississippi phenomenon; it’s the way we live now in the age of frenzied, hyper-nationalized activist politics.

The cavalcade of late support for McDaniel is as colorful as it was predictable: Woolery is headlining a bus tour for the Tea Party Express, a group that barely engaged in the race prior to the first round of voting on June 3. Josh Duggar, the Family Research Council official whose family became famous on the reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” has stumped for McDaniel. New outside groups — low-profile, bandwagon-hopping organizations with names like Now or Never PAC, Let Freedom Ring and the National Association for Gun Rights — have rushed into the race to spend money, often token sums, on McDaniel’s behalf. Ron Paul was here last weekend, and Santorum, the winner of Mississippi’s 2012 presidential primary, gave a full-throated plea for McDaniel on Thursday night.

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Standing in front of a preserved red caboose at the corner of a park in this Jackson suburb, a few dozen yards from an inflatable play area where the children of audience members bounced up and down, Santorum insisted that the race in Mississippi was something special: “That’s why you have Sarah Palin and Ron Paul and others coming here, because it’s much bigger.”

“I know in Mississippi, you can be the butt of jokes because you’re 50th in this or whatever the case may be. But now you can be first,” said Santorum, who has also been appearing in TV ads paid for by the group Citizens United. In melodramatic terms, he exhorted the audience to “make a difference, so you can tell your children and grandchildren: You know that race that started America in a different direction? I was here. I was there.”

Voters in the audience seemed alternately entertained and bemused by all the sudden attention lavished upon Mississippi. Some were more interested in the out-of-state entertainment than others. “I’m just really here to hear Chris,” said Sally Fletcher, a makeup artist from Madison.

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Jack Tharp, a retiree who was enthusiastic about both McDaniel and Santorum, called all the heavy exposure “unusual” for Mississippi. “I think people will be glad when it’s over with,” he said.

Until about a month ago, the array of organizations and politicians supporting McDaniel was a more exclusive group. Since last October, the state lawmaker has benefited from an extraordinarily lavish outside-spending campaign by the national Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund. Together, those two groups have reported spending more than $4 million on McDaniel’s behalf — nearly 70 cents out of every dollar pumped into the race by anti-Cochran independent groups.

The rest of the pro-McDaniel spending is divided among more than a dozen groups, each of which dived into the fight far later — and every one of which can be expected to claim a piece of the win if he triumphs on Tuesday.

Cochran has his own out-of-state and celebrity backers: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has dropped $700,000 into the runoff fight, most recently for ads featuring NFL legend Brett Favre endorsing Cochran. Arizona Sen. John McCain is expected to campaign for Cochran this weekend, and a host of Mississippi officials, including Gov. Phil Bryant, have hit the trail or recorded ads on his behalf.

But if Cochran has a gang of heavy-spending and prominent supporters, there is no equivalent on his side of the race to the bum’s rush of players on the right now hitching themselves to McDaniel. Some have already been aggressively promoting themselves as pivotal to McDaniel’s success, seizing on the high-profile race to hit up small donors for contributions.

On Wednesday, the national group Tea Party Patriots announced a “money bomb,” asking grass-roots supporters to kick in $1 million with less than a week to go. “We need to raise $1 million to help Chris McDaniel defeat RINO Thad Cochran,” blared the fundraising appeal, using the acronym for the term Republican in Name Only. The Tea Party Express, of Woolery bus-tour fame, blasted out a message on June 5 declaring: “We just got off the phone with the McDaniel campaign and they need our help!”

Earlier this spring, the conservative group FreedomWorks — which has reported putting about $400,000 into the race — posted an invitation to a May 5 “Campaign Kick Off” event in Jackson where FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe would appear with copies of his new book. (“This event is not affiliated with the official McDaniel political campaign,” the fine print read.)

The activists who have dived into the race in the final weeks and days say that they’re doing everything they can to support McDaniel. If the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund and Citizens United haven’t been spending Club for Growth-level money for six months, they have kicked in real funds toward the end. (Together, they make up about 20 percent of the independent spending on McDaniel’s side.)

Jenny Beth Martin, the Tea Party Patriots head who signed the $1 million fundraising appeal, said the group plans to knock on 8,000 doors a day between now and the runoff. Asked if she expected to raise and spend seven figures in that time, Martin was noncommittal. “We will see. The fundraising team is working on it,” said Martin, who spoke by phone on the way to a Mississippi radio interview. “We won’t be able to do television and radio [ads]. We may be able to put more people on the ground.”

The Family Research Council’s Duggar said the social conservative group — which has reported less than $40,000 in independent expenditures — has been “doing a lot to engage the Christian community.” The FRC pointed out that the head of the group, Tony Perkins, has a radio show that reaches into Mississippi and has emphasized a pro-McDaniel message. “We’ve been pouring some money into the state, and we have saturated the Christian radio market, really the Christian market in general,” said Duggar.

If there’s a novelty to the national attention converging on Mississippi, it was Cochran’s challenger who drew the greatest applause from the crowd in his fifth event of the day — and the first with a national surrogate. Paul Durfield, a biologist who works in nearby Pearl, said he was interested to see both Santorum and McDaniel, despite having been a Gingrich man in 2012.

“I like what Santorum has to say. I like him as a man and I would like him as a president. I don’t know that he’s real electable outside the Bible Belt,” Durfield said.

He shrugged: “I think most people here were die-hard McDaniel supporters. I don’t know that many minds are changed at these types of events.”