The Last Insurgent

In the special election to replace Cochran, who resigned earlier this year at age 80 for health reasons, establishment Republicans have made it clear who the wrong candidate would be—state senator Chris McDaniel, who challenged Cochran in the GOP primary in 2014 and very nearly beat him. That race crystallized the divide on the right and raised the alarm from Jackson to Washington, D.C. McDaniel was an avowed troublemaker, a self-proclaimed “constitutional conservative” backed by the Tea Party. His role model was Texas senator Ted Cruz, who months before had led an effort to defund Obamacare that resulted in a government shutdown. Many Republicans in Washington thought one Ted Cruz was more than enough.

McDaniel had seemed to come out of nowhere in 2014, propelled by grassroots energy and a populist urge to upset the established order. This year, establishment Republicans were prepared for his return.

In late January, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell invited Mississippi’s Republican governor, Phil Bryant, to be his guest at the State of the Union address. Cochran’s resignation, though not yet publicly announced, was expected, and the governor would be key in deciding his replacement. A special election to fill Cochran’s seat would not occur until November, but in the meantime, Bryant had the option of appointing an interim senator, thus giving that person the advantage of several months’ incumbency going into the election. Bryant’s options were discussed: McConnell slyly suggested that Bryant appoint himself; the governor demurred. The message was clear: anybody but McDaniel.

Cochran, for his part, timed his departure in a manner that boxed McDaniel into an awkward position. He announced his resignation on March 5 (effective April 1), which was past the filing deadline for Mississippi’s other Senate race, for the seat being defended by Roger Wicker. McDaniel, who’d been lured by the Cochran delay into entering the Wicker race, withdrew and announced for the special election. Governor Bryant publicly scolded McDaniel for his “opportunism” and appointed the state agricultural commissioner, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Mississippi’s interim senator.

Hyde-Smith, a lifelong Democrat who became a Republican in 2010 for her run for the commissioner’s office, had been a relatively minor player in Mississippi politics, but her appointment put McDaniel at a distinct disadvantage. Republican leadership in Washington gave Hyde-Smith, the first woman to represent Mississippi in Washington, the gift of key committee assignments, including Agriculture and a coveted seat on Appropriations, which had been chaired by Cochran.

Hyde-Smith had scarcely been sworn into office before the Chamber of Commerce spent $750,000 in Mississippi on commercials praising her and attacking McDaniel. “To me, that says they’re counting noses for the leadership race in a Republican Senate,” says David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, “and they really want to make sure McConnell isn’t challenged by a conservative.” McDaniel has already declared himself a “no” vote on McConnell’s leadership, if elected.

Haley Barbour, former Mississippi governor and the godfather of the state’s political establishment, has contributed $25,000 to a super-PAC run by his nephews, who were key players in Cochran’s narrow defeat of McDaniel in 2014. The Mississippi Victory Fund’s sole mission, its website proclaims, is “to make sure that a poor candidate like Chris McDaniel doesn’t cost Republicans in November.”

The November 6 special election is a “jungle general,” a free-for-all among candidates from all parties, the winner being whoever attains 50 percent of the vote. In the likelier event that no one reaches a majority, a runoff three weeks later will decide Mississippi’s next senator. Almost certain to reach the finals is the Democratic candidate, former congressman and Clinton agriculture secretary Mike Espy. African-Americans comprise nearly 38 percent of Mississippi’s population, with 90-plus percent of their votes going consistently to Democrats. That rate will, presumably, hold or even increase for Espy, who is black. That means that the special election is effectively a Republican primary to see who’ll face Espy in the November 27 runoff.

It is the Republican establishment’s aim to convince voters that McDaniel would be playing, in the language of the Barbour fund, “the role of Roy Moore in the race.” Espy will go into the runoff with 40 percent of the vote, this argument holds, and will only need to attract another 10 percent of voters weary of agitators like McDaniel to turn Mississippi into another Alabama.

It may be that McDaniel’s greatest enemy is not the establishment but the current political mood. With Donald Trump in the White House, the grassroots revolt that began with the Tea Party and culminated in the 2016 presidential election has lost much of its impetus. The wreckage of the insurgency can be seen not only in the failed campaigns of McConnell antagonists Roy Moore and Don Blankenship, who finished a distant third in West Virginia’s Republican Senate primary, but in the anti-establishment campaigns that didn’t materialize. President Trump, apparently seeing advantage for his agenda in Republican unity, has been discouraging would-be insurgents, such as Danny Tarkanian in Nevada, and endorsing establishment figures, like Mitt Romney, who were once his targets.

Last year, when anti-establishment fever was coursing through the right, the conservative billionaires Robert Mercer and Richard Uihlein gave $500,000 each to a super-PAC supporting McDaniel, with Uihlein pitching in another $250,000 in January. Neither has made a contribution since, and the PAC has reported no other contributions of $200 or more this year. The Club for Growth spent heavily on McDaniel’s 2014 campaign, attracted by his message of limited government and constitutional conservatism. It has not invested in any challenger to Republican incumbents in this cycle. McDaniel has been told that the group is waiting to see how his campaign comes together.

Just a few months ago, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and a prime instigator of the populist insurrection, promised to challenge nearly every Senate Republican facing reelection this year, with Chris McDaniel playing the marquee role. Bannon remains a McDaniel enthusiast. “You need McDaniel desperately because very few of them understand, much less agree with, Trump’s program,” Bannon says of the Republicans in Washington. “McDaniel has a quality you can’t coach—courage. It’s why he is needed in the Senate in particular.”

But circumstances have also forced a reassessment of Bannon’s priorities: Saving Trump’s agenda takes precedence over battling the Republican establishment. “We are now in jeopardy of losing both houses—with catastrophic consequences,” he says, noting that if the House passes into Democratic hands, Trump may well be impeached.

“The Trump supporters on Capitol Hill have known this for awhile and understand we don’t have the margin for error because of where the establishment put the president,” Bannon says. “This is why the Freedom Caucus and others put so little emphasis on primary challenges. Trump needs to survive the onslaught of 2018. For this movement there is no higher priority.”

McDaniel knows that with Obama gone and Trump scoring policy wins, the activist right might consider the revolution over, its goals achieved. “There was a time a few months ago when the anti-incumbent environment was more intense,” he tells me, over supper at a Hattiesburg restaurant called the Purple Parrot. “Trump has tempered that somewhat among the base, in that a lot of people believe that now that he’s there, the fight is won—he’s going to take on Washington, he’s going to prevail eventually.”

When I suggest that the populist insurgency may be in retreat, McDaniel stiffens. “Not this one,” he promises. “I’m ready for the fight, even if I have to stand alone.”

Combat is very much McDaniel’s political motif, as reflected in the battle-cry name of his political action committee: Remember Mississippi. That term was coined by McDaniel supporters aggrieved by his narrow primary loss to Cochran in 2014. They believe (as does McDaniel) that Cochran and the establishment only won by underhanded means.

McDaniel had received more votes in the primary than Cochran, but not the absolute majority that would have sent him to the Senate. Still, momentum and energy were on his side going into the runoff. Cochran, who was first elected to Congress in 1972, the year McDaniel was born, was by 2014 a diminished figure, distracted and strangely disconnected from the political peril he faced. In a rambling talk at one point during the runoff campaign, he slipped into a reverie about childhood visits to his grandparents’ home, “picking up pecans, from that to all kinds of indecent things with animals—I’m sure some of you know what that is.”

Some who worked on Cochran’s campaign say privately that he should have lost that race. But Cochran, and the Barbour machine supporting him, seized upon a wrinkle in Mississippi’s election law that provided a decisive advantage. Primary voters in the state are not required to register by party as long as they vote for the person they intend to vote for in the general election—an obviously unenforceable honor system. The Cochran forces invested in ginning up votes from traditionally Democratic precincts (one pro-Cochran flyer declared that “the Tea Party intends to prevent blacks from voting”), enlisting the support of black churches in the effort. Cochran won the runoff by 7,667 votes, his greatest gains from the first round of voting coming in the 10 Mississippi counties with the largest African-American populations.

McDaniel still seethes. “What they did was almost unthinkable,” he says. “That night, Republicans were asked to select a nominee for the United States Senate. And that night, the Democrats selected a nominee for the United States Senate. It’s irrefutable.” His current run is predicated on voter lividity. “The anger is still in the grassroots,” McDaniel says. “They’re still mad. They still feel like they’re disconnected from Washington, particularly in Mississippi.”

The June 12 Republican primaries in Virginia, where a populist won the Senate nomination, and South Carolina, where Trump critic Mark Sanford was turned out of the House, would seem to validate McDaniel’s belief that anti-establishment fervor still abides. He means to place Mitch McConnell squarely at the center of his campaign. “After the way the games were played to appoint Cindy Hyde-Smith to that position, the grassroots feel like that position was essentially stolen from them,” he says. “And they know that Mitch McConnell played a role. . . . If Mitch McConnell is going to play politics in Mississippi, that’s a clear example that Washington is still disconnected and that the anger has to prevail if we’re going to be successful, ultimately.”

Establishment Republicans doubt that this is the cycle for populist anger, especially in a race against Hyde-Smith, an unassuming 59-year-old cattle farmer from south Mississippi. She is universally described as “a nice lady.”

“His message hasn’t changed, but the environment around him has completely,” one prominent Mississippi Republican says of McDaniel. “There’s a Republican president, a Republican majority accomplishing things that Republican voters are for. There’s a new senator who’s a female, who doesn’t have 40 years in Washington, who is literally a cow farmer. It’s going to be very difficult to brand a cow farmer from Brookhaven as a tool of the Georgetown cocktail circuit.”

Hyde-Smith certainly intends to play up the nice-lady role. “I’m a God-fearing Southern Baptist from southwest Mississippi, and that’s exactly how you’re going to see me,” she promises. And however much Mitch McConnell may have helped her, she is not likely to embrace the majority leader in her campaign. “I had never met the man until I stepped on the floor of the Senate,” she tells me. “I have no history with Mitch McConnell at all, what—so—ever!”

McDaniel says that he need not attack Hyde-Smith, just highlight the distinctions between them, such as her likely support from McConnell and the fact that she was a Democrat until 2010. In that regard, he means to alert voters to the fact that Hyde-Smith voted in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, in which the top candidates were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom are anathema to Mississippi conservatives.

“In 2008, she votes for one of the two,” McDaniel says. That has the makings of a potent TV ad, and when I put the question to Hyde-Smith, she offers a response that still seems to need some work. “You can leave a ballot blank, or you can vote for the third or fourth person on there that nobody knows,” she says, “because I assure you that I didn’t vote for either. That is just honestly the 100 percent truth. It was probably a no-name, but I still can’t remember who the no-name was. But it certainly wasn’t either one of them. Because you have so many folks who just, you know, their names on the ballot”—Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and John Edwards were also on the ballot in 2008—“or you can have a write-in. That was, gosh, 10 years ago, and I have no idea what the name was.”

On the broader matter of having once been a Democrat, Hyde-Smith’s footing is surer. “When I first ran for office 20 years ago, the entire courthouse in my county was Democrat. Everybody was a Democrat,” she says. Mississippians of Hyde-Smith’s generation will sympathize. For most of a century, the state was so rigidly one-party that to register to vote was, effectively, to become a Democrat. Willie Morris in his memoirs wrote that such was the Democratic party’s old-time hegemony in his home state that “the only thing protecting Republicans was the game laws.” Mississippians didn’t send a Republican to Congress until the 1970s, and it wasn’t until the Haley Barbour era 25 years later that Republicans made meaningful inroads at the county courthouses across the state.

Mississippi’s special election may well be decided by the Trump factor. The torches-and-pitchforks fervor of 2010 and 2014 has subsided, but across the country Republican voters’ assessment of a candidate’s standing on the Trump scale still counts for much. They have been punishing Trump’s Republican antagonists with crippling poll numbers (Jeff Flake and Bob Corker) or outright defeat (Mark Sanford). In Mississippi, Trump’s favor, as one local website put it, “is stronger than goat’s breath.”

But Trump’s recent rapprochement with the party establishment may complicate the calculation for voters. In the 2014 race, Trump twice tweeted his support for McDaniel. Yet during McDaniel’s brief run against Roger Wicker this year, Trump endorsed the incumbent. After Hyde-Smith’s appointment, Republican leaders arranged a White House visit for the new senator in the hope of gaining Trump’s endorsement. The meeting was said to be cordial, but Trump has yet to give her the nod.

Hyde-Smith tells me that she recently received encouraging signals from people around the president, but added that a Trump endorsement “is certainly not anything that my campaign is hinging on.”

For McDaniel, a Trump endorsement—or simple Trump neutrality—could be critical. “I think Trump’s being pushed hard by McConnell to endorse his hand-selected person,” he says. “If he’ll hold off, and I believe he will, he’ll see that he’s getting a stronger conservative, and he’s getting one that’ll help him push back against McConnell as opposed to just catering every time McConnell speaks.”

McDaniel casts the race as a “generational election” and says that his campaign is a chance to “redefine what conservatism really is”—fiscal austerity and constitutional fealty. Those are not necessarily Trump’s core values, nor those of a party that is increasingly defined by Trumpism. Which is why the considerable forces arrayed against McDaniel believe that his campaign will be remembered as something else—a last, lonely skirmish in the Republican party’s long civil war.