Tight runoff reflects GOP divide

Dismay, anger flash over Cochran’s victory in Mississippi

U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran addresses supporters at his victory party Tuesday night in Jackson, Miss. His Tea Party challenger, Chris McDaniel, has refused to concede, saying he will probe “irregularities” in the runoff.

U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran addresses supporters at his victory party Tuesday night in Jackson, Miss. His Tea Party challenger, Chris McDaniel, has refused to concede, saying he will probe “irregularities” in the runoff.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

WASHINGTON -- Republicans reacted Wednesday to Sen. Thad Cochran's victory-by-inches in a primary runoff in Mississippi with a mix of views that reflected the sharp divide between the party's establishment and Tea Party.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a prominent voice of the Tea Party movement, said that despite the loss Tuesday by state Sen. Chris McDaniel, the Tea Party-aligned challenger to Cochran, he was struck by how close the race was and by the great effort that establishment Republicans took to beat an upstart candidate.

"You saw the Washington Republican establishment put millions of dollars into that race to preserve an incumbent," Cruz said on Fox News on Wednesday, "and they encouraged an awful lot of Democrats to vote in that race, and won a razor-thin race. I think that demonstrates that there's a lot of hunger for change."

But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who just fought off a primary challenge of his own from several opponents to his right, called the campaign against Cochran part of a misguided "purification effort" that is hurting the party.

"You add up all the money we spent on this intraparty fight, that's a lot of resources we could have had to pick up the seats necessary to get a majority," Graham said Wednesday. "Thad Cochran, like any of us, I'm sure, is not a perfect senator. But really, is he the problem compared to our Democratic colleagues?"

Republicans need to pick up six seats in November to capture the Senate majority.

Some national groups that poured money into McDaniel's campaign were so angry after the vote that they were considering drastic options to keep their candidate afloat politically.

According to one person involved in the discussions among the leaders of these groups, the possibilities include trying to build support for a write-in campaign or a third-party run by McDaniel -- a move that likely would draw Republican votes away from Cochran and help his Democratic challenger, Travis Childers.

But Austin Barbour, a campaign adviser to Cochran, said that a write-in campaign would be illegal under Mississippi law and that McDaniel had missed the deadline to get on the ballot as an independent.

In addition, some Tea Party leaders were discussing throwing their weight behind Childers. Though he is a Democrat, some of his views -- he is anti-abortion and opposes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- are attractive to conservatives.

"The Tea Party is so burned they may do something radical," a conservative leader involved in the planning said, asking not to be named in order to discuss internal deliberations.

Other Tea Party statements maintained the bitter tone that characterized McDaniel's speech after the polls closed Tuesday night.

"In Mississippi, nefarious campaign tactics seem to have won the day over ideas and a bold conservative vision," Taylor Budowich, the executive director of the Tea Party Express, said in an emailed statement.

McDaniel, meanwhile, complained that a number of Democrats apparently cast ballots in the GOP runoff and boosted Cochran's numbers. McDaniel refused to concede the race and said he would probe "irregularities" in Tuesday's voting.

Voters who cast ballots in the June 3 Democratic primary were barred from participating in the runoff, so an appeal by Cochran to non-Republicans had prompted Tea Party supporters -- as well as the NAACP and the Justice Department -- to keep tabs on who was voting in Mississippi.

Meanwhile, the Mississippi race wasn't the only one where a longtime congressman faced a tough primary challenge this week.

U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, the face of Harlem politics for generations, appeared to hold off his Democratic challenger and moved one step closer to what he said will be his 23rd and final term in the House.

The election pitted Rangel, who has long personified the area's role in as a center of black political culture, against Adriano Espaillat, 59, a veteran state senator seeking to become the first person born in the Dominican Republic to be elected to Congress.

With 100 percent of the vote counted in unofficial results, Rangel led Espaillat 47.4 percent to 43.6 percent, a difference of fewer than 2,000 votes. Nearly 47,800 votes had been counted.

Espaillat, who lost to Rangel in 2012 by about 1,000 votes in results that took two weeks to finalize, has not conceded, urging that every vote be counted. The official count won't start until July 2, when the absentee and provisional ballots are opened, and Espaillat's team has said it could mount a legal challenge. His campaign declined to comment Wednesday.

According to data from the city Board of Elections, the number of absentee and provisional ballots would not be sufficient for Espaillat to make up the difference in the vote.

Information for this article was contributed by David S. Joachim, Ashley Parker, Jeremy W. Peters and Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times and by Jonathan Lemire, Jennifer Peltz, Deepti Hajela, Bill Barrow, Emily Wagster Pettus and Michael Sisak of The Associated Press.

A Section on 06/26/2014