Commuters headed east and away from Pearl, Mississippi, on Interstate 20 can’t miss the first one. Facing his first serious primary challenge, Sen. Roger Wicker has copied-and-pasted the president’s tweets onto billboards.
It’s the ultimate retweet, and it’s a smart strategy, considering the fact that less than a quarter of U.S. adults actually have a Twitter account. About 14-feet high, 48-feet wide, and definitely impossible to miss, the billboards solidify Wicker as the candidate with Trump’s endorsement.
So @RogerWicker is copying and pasting Trump’s tweets onto billboards down in Mississippi. pic.twitter.com/51rCjOQ305
— Philip Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) March 2, 2018
But while the billboards probably won’t cause a traffic jam, they do show the Wicker campaign could be at risk of driving off the road just like Sen. Luther Strange did last September in neighboring Alabama.
Like Strange, Wicker has welcomed the endorsement of Trump. Who wouldn’t? The president won the Republican primary and general election in Mississippi by double digits. Down south, Trump is still popular. But that’s not enough to win a campaign against a determined opponent. Strange had to learn that the hard way.
At every campaign stop, rally, and debate, Strange touted the fact that he had a personal relationship with the president. It didn’t do him any good. Judge Roy Moore rolled over him easily in the primary because, for one of many reasons, Strange incorrectly assumed that proximity to the president would be enough to win.
Moore only crashed and burned when his dalliances with underage girls came to light. That seems more than unlikely to happen with Wicker’s opponent, state Sen. Chris McDaniel.
Wicker will need more than a presidential endorsement to beat that conservative firebrand. McDaniel isn’t some Tea Party lightweight. No one knows this better than Wicker’s Mississippi colleague, Sen. Thad Cochran, who received fewer votes than McDaniel in the 2014 Republican primary before mounting a winning comeback during an ensuing runoff.
So far, the Wicker strategy looks a lot like the one Strange adopted and failed with last year. With the billboards, that Republican might be advertising a weakness for his opponent to exploit.
