Republican Chris McDaniel on Monday signaled his intention to challenge incumbent Sen. Roger Wicker in Mississippi’s June 5 primary.
In a Facebook Live broadcast, McDaniel, a state senator, invited supporters to join him at a local junior college on Wednesday for a major announcement. A McDaniel supporter told the Washington Examiner that McDaniel had decided to run against Wicker after several months of teasing a 2018 Senate bid, and the insurgent conservative basically confirmed those plans in brief remarks on social media.
“You can probably read between the lines as to why I would be holding an event,” McDaniel said. “We’re looking for a fight.”
The filing deadline to run for office in Mississippi this year is Thursday.
The Club for Growth, an influential conservative advocacy organization that backed McDaniel over Cochran in 2014, told the Washington Examiner on Monday that it could endorse him again in 2018 if he jumps into the primary against Wicker.
“We’re strongly considering it,” club spokeswoman Rachael Slobodien said in an email exchange. “Senator Wicker has a dismal lifetime score of 69 percent on the Club for Growth Foundation’s scorecard. That signals Senator Wicker is not a strong supporter of pro-growth economic policies and makes us very interested when it comes time to look for potential replacements.”
This wouldn’t be the first time McDaniel has challenged a sitting Republican with deep ties to party leadership in Washington in a primary. He ran against Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., four years ago, and came up just short. He narrowly defeated Cochran in round one of the Republican primary, but was forced into a runoff because he did not garner more than 50 percent of the vote.
In that contest, two weeks later, the incumbent recovered to win in a photo-finish. The outcome angered insurgent conservatives angry with the Republican political establishment; they had supported McDaniel because he vowed to oppose GOP leaders in Washington a promised a voting record more in line with the Constitution.
“Chris McDaniel is a true conservative who better reflects the values of Mississippi voters,” a Republican insider said.
McDaniel appeared full speed ahead toward challenging Wicker late last year. He appeared to put the brakes on his 2018 candidacy when his political patron, nationalist firebrand Steve Bannon, was embarrassed by the results of the special Senate election in Alabama and then excommunicated from elite levels of Republican politics by President Trump.
Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House, endorsed Republican Roy Moore in the Alabama special, sticking with him through multiple allegations of sexual impropriety. Moore’s loss to now Sen. Doug Jones, who became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Alabama in a generation, was a significant blow to Bannon’s clout.
A few weeks later, Bannon made news for criticizing Trump in a newly published book. Soon after, the president made clear that Bannon was no longer a member of his inner circles. Simultaneously, Bannon was fired as executive chairman of Breitbart News. All of this, and Trump’s decision last fall to back Wicker for re-election, could make McDaniel’s path even more difficult than it might have been otherwise.
McDaniel in during the 2016 presidential was critical of Trump. Last year, he lashed out against the president’s tax reform proposal, calling an initial version of it an “embarrassment.” All of that could hurt McDaniel with Republican primary voters — many of whom are strongly supportive of the commander in chief.
“His attacks on President Trump and Trump’s tax cuts won’t sit well with Trump’s supporters,” a GOP strategist said.
