A new poll by Democratic pollster Chism Strategies has found state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-MS) just barely leading Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) in the Mississippi Republican Senate primary.
The new poll, obtained by TPM from a Democratic operative, found McDaniel leading Cochran, 46 percent to 44 percent among 813 likely Republican primary voters. Another 7.9 percent said they were undecided and a tiny 1.4 percent said they would vote for Republican Thomas Carey, who’s also running in the primary. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
Chism Strategies has done polling for former Rep. Travis Childers (D-MS), the expected Democratic nominee in the Senate race.
The poll’s findings conflict with GOP pollster Harper Polling’s latest poll on the race which showed Cochran leading McDaniel 45 percent to 40 percent.
Those polls are a rare pair of surveys that have come out since news broke that a pro-McDaniel political blogger was arrested for photographing Cochran’s wife for an anti-Cochran video. McDaniel has been hit by a wave of questions about that break-in and any possible links his campaign has to the blogger, and the district attorney has said no one, including anyone from the McDaniel campaign, has yet been cleared in the investigation.
According to the Chism Strategies memo accompanying the poll, McDaniel has been able to recover from the drop he suffered in the immediate aftermath of news of the scandal.
“McDaniel’s numbers have recovered after the initial drop in the wake of the arrests of campaign supporters,” the memo said.
Moreover, just 17 percent of undecideds said they were much less likely to support McDaniel because of the ongoing story about political blogger “Constitutional” Clayton Kelly. An equal number said they were somewhat less likely and a whopping 67 percent said the story had no impact on their support of McDaniel.
Chism Strategies also cautioned that right now the race is too close to call. The primary will take place on June 3.
Correction: This post originally said Chism Strategies is former Rep. Travis Childers’ pollster. Chism has done work for Childers but is not his pollster. We regret the error.
Dear everyone - McDaniel is almost certainly going to win. These Mississippians are that goddamned stupid and myopic.
Mississippi is tea party country much like Texas. I would bet that the tea partier is leading right now. I don’t care who wins this primary they are both republicans and both will be a terrible representative for Mississippi the poorest state in the union. If Mississippians wonder why they have the poorest schools, the lowest wages, the worse healthcare look no further than your republican representatives including federal and state. I quit feeling sorry for those in Mississippi because you get what you reap, and boy they are reaping crap. This is someone saying this that was born and raised in Mississippi and thankfully no longer live there. Not to say that Florida is doing a heck of a lot better in some ways where I live now. I have relatives in Mississippi who have loved ones on Medicare and yet say that we should do away with Medicare. How insane is that?? That is the kind of mentality that you find in Mississippi.
I’m not sure whether to be upset or happy over this. MS is not going to go Democratic this cycle even if we ran Jesus.
But if the Rethugs win the Senate, Cochran might be slightly better to have in office than McDaniel - in the same way that the flu is better than pneumonia.
I disagree…let McDaniel win and represent, in all his Tea Party glory, the state of Mississippi.
Let Teh Crazy® run rampant, for all the world to see. The more nutbags we have up there spouting Teh Crazy®, the easier it will be to point out the lunacy. We’ll never get the 30 percent of the nation that is lock, stock and barrel committed to the GOP brand of insanity, but the higher their freak flags fly, the more visible they are to anyone with a brain.
I say bring it on, and let them feel the pain in 2016.
It’s the mean-spiritedness. They don’t want someone they can have a beer with; they want someone who they can kick and piss on their perceived enemies with.
The nursing home scandal is just what he needed to convince MS voters that he’s just like them.