Republican Chris McDaniel’s upstart bid for a Mississippi Senate seat is struggling for traction, with the conservative firebrand raising just $173,373 in the second quarter.
The weak performance left McDaniel with a paltry $156,000 in the bank, jeopardizing his special election campaign for the seat vacated earlier this year by Republican Thad Cochran and now held by Cindy Hyde-Smith, who was appointed by GOP Gov. Phil Bryant.
The contest will be decided on Nov. 6, the same day as the midterm election, with a runoff to follow three weeks later, and Hyde-Smith, McDaniel’s primary opponent, raised $1.6 million in the second quarter and closed the period with $1.4 million in cash on hand.
Hyde-Smith’s money, with more surely to follow in the third quarter — not to mention the full support of Bryant’s political machine — will buy a lot of advertising and finance a robust voter turnout operation in Mississippi. That could leave McDaniel in a hole too deep to dig out of.
McDaniel’s salvation might rest with an unlikely endorsement from President Trump. The president has yet to endorse in the special election. But it would seem unlikely that he would back McDaniel after the state senator, who supported Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, was so publicly critical of then-candidate Trump during that campaign.
Wealthy Republican donors that have supported McDaniel might also come to his rescue.
The McDaniel super PAC, “Remember Mississippi,” reported $341,000 in cash on hand as of June 30, according to disclosures with the Federal Election Commission. But influential conservative donors like Robert Mercer and Richard Uihlein have written big checks to the group over the past year, and could do so again.
Y’all Politics, a blog that covers Mississippi politics, examined the McDaniel campaign’s second quarter FEC report and noted that “various members of the Mercer and Uihlein families, which had given substantial money to the PAC, maxed out to McDaniels campaign this quarter.”
In 2014, McDaniel nearly knocked off Cochran in the Republican primary. He won round one but fell short of the 50 percent threshold to advance to the general election. Cochran won the runoff, in part with the help of Democratic voters. The Republican establishments in Washington and Mississippi opposed McDaniel in that campaign, believing him to be a flawed candidate who could jeopardize control of a Senate seat in an otherwise ruby red state; their opinion of him has not changed.
McDaniel this year was being recruited by some conservatives to challenge Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., in this year’s primary, but shifted gears to the special election after Trump endorsed Wicker and Cochran resigned, triggering a special election.
Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, was among those appealing to McDaniel to run for Senate, but later abandoned his planned insurgency against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., after Trump aligned himself with McConnell and he fell out of favor with the president.
