“What happened in Mississippi was appalling,” said Senator Ted Cruz on the Mark Levin Radio Show Monday evening. “Primaries are always rough and tumble but the conduct of the Washington DC machine in the Mississippi run-off machine was incredibly disappointing.”
“In that race,” he continued, “we know some things – and then there are even more serious allegations that have been raised. What we know at the outset, is that Chris McDaniel won a sizable majority of the votes from Republicans in the runoff. But the DC machine spent hundreds of millions of dollars urging some 30,000 to 40,000 partisan Democrats to vote in the runoff and they changed the outcome.”
Cruz made sure to note that “all of us want to grow the party,” adding, “but what the DC machine did was not to grow the party – the ads they ran were racially charged false attacks and they were explicit promises to continue to expand the welfare state. And nobody has suggested that the Democrats who voted in the primary will actually vote Republican in the general election. Instead, they were just recruited to decide who the Republican nominee was.”
As unprincipled and wrong as that was, more troubling are the serious allegations of voter fraud, Cruz continued. “And I very much hope that no Republican was involved with voter fraud.”
He said, “these allegations need to be vigorously investigated and anyone involved in criminal conduct should be prosecuted. The voters of Mississippi deserve to know the truth.”
After the break, Cruz repeated his call for an investigation and his hope that no Republicans were involved in it. “I think it would be abominable if Republicans were involved in voter fraud,” he concluded.
Let me tell you something. The Stupid Party better wise up real fast, because what happened in Mississippi was so nasty, so corrupt, and rotten, it could seriously derail their chances of retaking the Senate.
I have the same sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had when Todd Akin irredeemably botched an abortion question during the 2012 election season. The Democrat party was having some success with their manufactured Republican War on Women narrative and Akin walked right into a mine field with his “legitimate rape” comment. He needed to step down and let another Republican take his place in the wake of the firestorm. But he refused. And he lost. I knew he would lose. Missouri was sentenced to another six years of Claire McCaskill – a tragic outcome could have been avoided.
The GOP establishment seems to have no idea how disgusted and enraged the conservative base is about their corrupt tactics in the Mississippi runoff. If they were smart, they would ask Cochran to step down and let the younger, sharper, and more popular Republican Chris McDaniel take his place.
All would be forgotten. (Of course, if any laws were broken, those involved would need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.) But if Cochran is the candidate , he cannot be considered a sure thing in the general – in fact, my gut is telling me he’ll lose. And frankly, he deserves to.
And that makes retaking the Senate all the more difficult.
Republicans may have succeeded in making themselves their own worst enemy in the Fall by refusing to yield any ground at all to any already weary base.
“This infighting has taken its toll,” said Amy Walter, a national political analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Republicans “are not as enthusiastic as they were in 2010. Even they are a little bit disillusioned by what’s been happening over the last couple years.”
That also means Republican candidates are not getting the benefit of the doubt among independent voters as they did in 2010, Walter added.