Sen. Thad Cochran, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, won a runoff election Tuesday in Mississippi after placing second in a June 3 primary in which no candidate won 50 percent of the votes.
Cochran beat Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniels 190,633 to 184,260, according to the Associated Press’s vote count. Fewer than 1,500 votes separated the two candidates in the primary, but neither men earned enough votes to win the election outright.
McDaniels did not concede Tuesday night, referencing voting irregularities that he wanted investigated. But in a short victory speech, only about a minute and a half long, Cochran told supporters, “what we have reflected here tonight is a consensus for more and better jobs for Mississippians, and for a military force with the capacity to defend the security interests of the United States. Those are the principles, grounds, planks in the platform of the campaign.”
That confluence of jobs and national security in the Gulf Coast region of Mississippi, combined with Cochran’s seniority on the defense appropriations panel, seems to have led the 76-year-old to victory in this second vote. While McDaniels supporters criticized Cochran for reaching out to black Democrats in particular–Mississippi has an open primary rule that essentially allowed anyone to vote in the runoff as long as they hadn’t voted in the Democratic primary election–a former Ingalls Shipbuilding president and CEO said Cochran’s seniority in Congress swayed all kinds of voters in Southern Mississippi to come out and vote this week.
Jerry St. Pé, who served as president of the shipyard from 1985 to 2001 and still lives nearby, said that Ingalls Shipbuilding is the largest employer in the state, with 12,000 employees and about 9,000 of them living in the Gulf Coast area. Those employees, as well as the rest of the community, understand the importance of the shipyard in the community, and the importance of federal dollars to keep the yard open.
St. Pé said the Cochran campaign used the three weeks leading up to the runoff election to focus on Cochran’s seniority. McDaniels spoke of fighting for Mississippi, but St. Pé said that, like it or not, “in order to fight and be in the fight, you’ve got to be invited into the ring…The rules are what they are, and seniority produces key committee assignments, and key committee assignments results in chairmanship”
With Republicans optimistic of their chances of winning the majority of the Senate in November, the specter of Cochran taking over as chairman of the defense subcommittee added even more credence to his message.
“It resonated with people who came to understand that we would be trading off someone with Cochran’s seniority…for a freshman senator,” St. Pé said.
He noted there were “lots of lessons learned” from this primary election, and he said “it’s going to take a little more time to let the dust settle to get a good understanding of what things went right and what things didn’t go so right.” But the day after the runoff, St. Pé said he believed that complacency about politics, which is not unique to Mississippi, probably played a role. Between lack of voter turnout, the idea that Cochran “probably was a shoe-in,” and McDaniels putting significant time and money into his campaign, it is “not surprising that we woke up here on June 4 and said, gee, what’s happened here, and now what do we need to do about it?”
St. Pé said he thought support for Cochran would continue into general election season, with the primary serving as a wakeup call for voters who have so much to lose.
“Shipbuilding contracts are long by nature, sometimes it’s 10 years before a new design ship finds its way” to a production contract at a yard,” St. Pé said. “And having someone in a key position just raises a higher level of confidence that the programs that are important not just for jobs… but are important to the United States Navy” will survive the long process and receive the funding they need.