"Mississippi Senate race tops Tuesday’s 8 primaries" by Charles Babington | Associated Press June 02, 2014
WASHINGTON — Strange, unsavory twists in Mississippi’s Senate Republican race are grabbing the most attention of Tuesday’s primary elections in eight states.
Senator Thad Cochran, seeking a seventh six-year term, faces state Senator Chris McDaniel, who’s backed by Tea Party groups.
Voters in Alabama, California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota also will nominate candidates for the Nov. 4 elections.
The Mississippi Senate race initially followed familiar themes. Cochran, backed by the Republican establishment, said he consistently steers federal money to the state. McDaniel said Cochran is insufficiently conservative.
Things turned bizarre when four McDaniel supporters were charged with crimes after one of them photographed Cochran’s wife in her nursing home, where she has spent 13 years with dementia.
Police said the four men conspired to use the images to advance allegations Cochran was having an inappropriate relationship, which the senator denies. McDaniel and others have raised questions about Cochran bringing a female Senate aide on numerous official trips overseas.
Cochran’s adult children say he remains devoted to his wife. McDaniel says he had no part in the photography incident, calling it reprehensible.
Still, the matter has dominated the campaign’s closing days, with each side accusing the other of underhanded politics. Whoever wins Tuesday will be favored in November in the heavily Republican state.
In Iowa, a much more competitive state, voters will pick nominees to succeed retiring Democratic Senator Tom Harkin.
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"In Miss., it’s Tea Party vs. old-school GOP in nasty feud" by Jonathan Weisman | New York Times May 30, 2014
WASHINGTON — The feud between the Republican establishment and the Tea Party has engendered more whimpers than war so far. The notable exception is in Mississippi, where the campaign to unseat Senator Thad Cochran has become the nastiest, and most personal, in the nation.
Supporters of the senator’s Republican primary opponent, Chris McDaniel, have charged that Cochran has shown favoritism toward his longtime executive assistant, Kay Webber, even as his wife, Rose, is confined to a nursing home, suffering from dementia.
The accusations took a bizarre turn this month when a conservative blogger, Clayton Thomas Kelly, was arrested on charges of entering the facility on April 20 to photograph the bedridden Rose Cochran without her permission. Three others were arrested last week, and all four face criminal charges related to the episode.
Thad Cochran’s campaign responded by making a political commercial using footage of Kelly in handcuffs. Over foreboding music, the narrator says:
“It’s the worst: A Chris McDaniel supporter charged with a felony for posting video of Senator Thad Cochran’s wife in a nursing home. . . Rise up and say ‘no’ to dirty politics.’’
Mississippi politics has always had a rough edge under the veneer of Southern gentility, but this race has reached another level. Cochran is a politician in the old-school tradition, with a courtly manner and, through his seniority, a high-powered ability to deliver federal dollars to one of the nation’s poorest states. In his 2008 reelection campaign, he ran unopposed in the primary.
Now he is being tested as never before by McDaniel, a state senator with strong Tea Party backing who is asking voters to send the six-term senator into involuntary retirement in the primary Tuesday.
The race represents the last chance for Tea Party activists to topple an incumbent, and McDaniel’s supporters have aggressively scoured Cochran’s record and distributed their findings to numerous news media outlets — leaning heavily on his relationship with Webber as part of a larger case that the senator is skating on probity’s edge.
They point to an unusual arrangement whereby Cochran rents the basement apartment in a $1.6 million row house owned by Webber that is a short walk from the Capitol.
He has also rented the first floor of her house to hold two fund-raisers.
McDaniel supporters have combed through Senate travel records to find that Webber, despite having no particular area of expertise, had taken 28 trips to 45 countries with Cochran, on top of 39 trips to Mississippi, from 2011 to 2013, all at taxpayer expense.
Cochran campaign officials say there is nothing unusual about the senator’s connections to his aide, who, like Cochran, is 76 and has worked on Capitol Hill since the 1970s.
Webber’s travel with the senator is “strictly professional” and “is perfectly appropriate as a senior staff member,” said Jordan Russell, a spokesman for the Cochran campaign.
The senator declined to be interviewed.
But some ethics experts say the charges may have merit.
“It’s this Gordian knot of conflicts and potential conflicts,” said Bill Allison, editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks ethics issues in Washington. “It’s difficult to begin even seeing how to begin to untangle it.”
Cleta Mitchell, a campaign finance lawyer who is working for a super PAC that is supporting McDaniel, objected to Webber’s accompanying the senator on so many trips.
“Bottom line: The taxpayers are subsidizing Sen. Cochran and his ‘assistant’ to accompany him all over the world — which is contrary to the law and Senate ethics rules,” Mitchell said in an e-mail.
It is unusual for an executive assistant to travel so frequently. The trips, to such places as Azerbaijan and Paris, have also included other senators and their aides, typically staffers with specific expertise in appropriations, foreign aid, defense, or diplomacy. On these trips, Webber also received a total of about $115,000 in standard daily stipend payments and some transportation costs.
In addition to criticizing the trips, the McDaniel campaign has focused on the senator’s residency, reprising an issue that has undermined other long-serving incumbents, who were criticized for becoming a part of the Washington elite and losing touch with constituents back home.
That has created a battle of documents, with McDaniel’s supporters offering up trust documents, a Federal Election Commission filing, and a property appraisal to show that Cochran had identified the Capitol Hill row house as his primary residence. Cochran’s campaign put forth other records to show that the senator had listed his home in Oxford, Miss., as his residence.
Cochran, elected to the House in 1972, arrived in Washington in an era when members of Congress commonly moved to the capital. The senator and his wife raised their two children in Alexandria, Va., without protest from Mississippi voters, who reelected him five times, by wide margins. But nowadays, hostility toward Washington among some Republican activists has made where the senator lives a campaign issue.
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Related: Mississippi to use its voter ID law Tuesday
I'm sure I will have a next day update for you tomorrow so stay tuned.
UPDATE: Runoff in Mississippi for GOP Senate nomination
Democrats are happy, huh?
Also see: Sasse Nebraska Tea Party
The numbers are not adding up for me, readers. Here we have a Congress whose approval ratings are in the low teens if they are lucky, and yet the incumbents and e$tablishment $cum are being reelected?
"Democrats to spend $44m on ads to gain House seats" by Philip Elliott | Associated Press May 30, 2014
WASHINGTON — House Democrats are ready to empty their deep pockets for television ads in their uphill climb to overtake Republicans as the majority party.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee began asking television stations Thursday in 36 districts to set aside broadcast and cable advertising time for the fall’s campaign blitz.
It comes to almost $44 million in ad requests, the most ever from the committee and the biggest so far this election year from a party-run campaign committee.
The level of detail in the spending plan telegraphs what races the Democrats plan to spend money on, and when. The party committee cannot coordinate with allies at super political action committees, but operatives can point to public sources such as news stories to ensure outside groups are not missing races or wasting money.
But the tactic comes with a risk. Republicans can now see when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee plans to be on the air, and in what markets. In Massachusetts, the committee will pay $460,000 on cable ads and $965,000 for broadcast ads for the Boston-Manchester, N.H., market in October and November to help Representative John Tierney.
In all, the committee plans to spend money in 19 districts to defend incumbent Democrats, mostly newcomers, and in 17 districts that are in Republican hands.
The big spending might not be enough to tip the balance of power. House Republicans have 233 seats and Democrats have 199 seats. There are three vacancies.
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"Attacks drive GOP donors to stealth nonprofits; Harsh criticism reduces giving to top super PACs" by Matea Gold | Washington Post May 30, 2014
WASHINGTON — Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s relentless attacks on the billionaire Koch brothers are having an unforeseen impact: spurring other wealthy GOP donors to give more money to groups that keep their supporters’ names secret.
Several prominent pro-Republican advocacy groups say they are benefiting from a burst of cash as some donors — fearful of harsh public attacks such as those aimed at the Kochs — turn away from political committees required under federal law to reveal their contributors.
The trend can be seen at the prominent GOP super PAC cofounded by strategist Karl Rove, American Crossroads, which discloses its donors to the Federal Election Commission.
The group, which hauled in $117 million during the 2012 election, has raised $9 million so far this cycle — including just $266,000 in April.
At the same time, group officials said, donors are more interested than ever in supporting Crossroads GPS, a sister organization with a tax-exempt status that allows it to keep its donor list private.
The two groups recently kicked off a $10 million television advertising campaign against vulnerable Senate Democrats — $8 million of which was paid for by Crossroads GPS.
Paul Lindsay, a Crossroads spokesman, said the spotlight Reid and others have put on major political funders on the right has driven more contributors to the nonprofit. Democrats are ‘‘dragging private citizens through the mud, and that’s led to a shift of sorts for donors,’’ Lindsay said.
Politically active tax-exempt groups are on track to play a larger role this cycle than in 2012, which saw $310 million in reported election spending by non-disclosing groups.
These organizations are set up as ‘‘social welfare’’ groups or business lobbies under the tax code, designations that give them wide leeway to engage in campaigns without having to register as political committees and disclose donors to the FEC.
Political nonprofits have become major players in elections since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision paved the way for unlimited political spending by corporations and unions.
The Obama administration moved late last year to crack down on political nonprofits, proposing a new Internal Revenue Service rule that could have limited their election-related activities.
But after the draft rule triggered protests from the left and the right, the agency confirmed last week that it plans to rework the regulation, delaying the process indefinitely.
The delay allows the clout of these politically oriented nonprofits to grow, at least in the near term.
‘‘We’ll see more groups abusing the tax laws, calling themselves social welfare groups, when they really are political groups,’’ said Miles Rapoport, president of Common Cause, a nonpartisan group seeking to reduce the influence of money on politics.
Industrialists Charles and David Koch have given millions of dollars to conservative super PACs, which are required to disclose donors.
They are also the backers of an extensive network of political nonprofits, which raised at least $400 million in 2012 from unknown donors. This year, groups in the Koch network such as Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners are spending millions of dollars on ads against vulnerable Senate Democrats, a barrage that could help the GOP retake the chamber.
The Kochs have defended the right to spend money anonymously, noting that many donors across the political spectrum seek privacy. They point to the threats they have weathered since gaining a public profile.
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Also see: Koch brothers targeting fair bankruptcy deal in Detroit
Related: Conyers Comes Up Short
