JACKSON, Miss. — The Mississippi Republican Party said U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran won the state’s Republican primary runoff over challenger Chris McDaniel by 7,667 votes.
The party sent results to the Secretary of State on Monday, the legal deadline.
The GOP’s numbers showed Cochran winning by more than the 6,800 votes counted by The Associated Press after the June election. Tallies changed as county parties examined provisional ballots and finalized results.
McDaniel, a state senator, has said he would challenge the results. But his attorney Mitch Tyner says it could be days before that happens.
Tyner said the campaign must first finish its investigation into how many voters improperly cast absentee ballots or who voted in both the Democratic primary and GOP runoff, a violation of state law. Cochran, seeking his seventh term, will face Democrat Travis Childers in November.
As you all know Mark Mayfield Vice Chair of the Mississippi Tea Party and one of Chris McDaniel's supporters charged with violating Mrs. Tad Cochran's privacy and exploiting her, committed suicide on Friday.
Do you think Mayfield did do himself in? There was a suicide note. However Sarah talked to Chris on election night and told him not to give up. Was Mayfield going to sing like a bird like Johnny Mac did during 'Nam?
What do you think?
Oh look and see who is a big McDaniel supporter. Check out the guy in the beige jacket standing behind Chris:
By the numbers, Tea Party-backed challenger Chris McDaniel lost Tuesday night’s runoff election to incumbent Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, but the conservative firebrand says he’s not giving up the fight yet.
“Now, it is our job to make sure the sanctity of the vote is upheld,” McDaniel said in a fiery speech – which did not include a concession – after the race was called. “Before this race ends, we have to be absolutely certain that the Republican primary was won by Republican voters.”
McDaniel and his backers objected to Cochran’s open courting of non-GOP voters, including the state’s sizable African American Democratic population. Party registration is not required to vote in primary elections in the state, and any voters who did not participate in the Democratic primary were eligible to vote in the GOP runoff.
Oklahoma Rep. James Lankford on Tuesday earned an outright victory in the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Tom Coburn.
The Associated Press reported that Lankford broke the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff in the seven-person GOP primary field. He faced a serious challenge tea party backed T.W. Shannon, the former Oklahoma House Speaker and the only other Republican challenger able to somewhat keep pace with Lankford’s fundraising.
Coburn announced in January he would retire at the congressional session due to recurrence of prostate cancer.
Now ole Skanky is butthurt over this:
As we pointed out last week (see: http://t.co/y8T64iZQyR), there were several potentially illegal political games afoot in Mississippi to motivate Democrat voters to "switch" over to the GOP for a day to help save a 42 year Republican member of Congress. On top of that, millions of dollars from out of state liberal billionaires like Mike Bloomberg poured in at the last minute on that same incumbent’s behalf. You have to ask yourself why? When a primary election is lost fairly, I am all for unifying behind the victor and joining forces to fight in November. When an election is questionable, with potential legal violations, politics MUST be put aside and the irregularities MUST be fully investigated. Regardless of party, we owe it to voters and to democracy within our Republic. The integrity of the vote speaks directly to the integrity of those who serve and the trust we ask the American public to put in our institutions. I told Chris McDaniel last night that I stand with his effort to get to the bottom of this – he needs to know average, but tremendously concerned, citizens want to make sure the integrity of last night’s results in Mississippi are verified. Voting shenanigans never cease to amaze, but they had better cease altogether for the sake of ethical elections. And any GOP “architect” behind these abhorrent voting shenanigans should be ashamed of this Pyrrhic victory for the establishment. If we find out it's true that some of the characters alleged to have masterminded this Mississippi hijacking are the same ones who've tried to destroy other Republicans’ careers, they need to be taken to task and only be hired by unethical campaigns. Fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us. And if any news organization ignores a free and fair elections issue like this, then whether left-leaning or center right, their silence will speak volumes.
Records show conservative Republican U.S. Senate candidate Chris McDaniel voted as a Democrat in the 2003 state primary.
McDaniel and others question the accuracy of the records and accuse Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a potential opponent, of using state resources for “opposition research” on McDaniel. Hosemann denies this and said McDaniel is trying to deflect attention from his voting record. McDaniel has said he was inspired as a teenager by Ronald Reagan to become a lifelong Republican. Republican Hosemann is thought by many to be waiting in the wings to run for the U.S. Senate seat, along with McDaniel, should incumbent Thad Cochran not seek re-election. Computerized voting records kept by the secretary of state’s office show McDaniel voted in the statewide Democratic primary in 2003, and he appears to have not voted in some big Republican elections, including the 2008 GOP presidential/congressional primary.
Sarah had no problem with Rush Limbaugh imploring Republican voters to vote for Hillary during the 2008 primaries.
US Senate candidate from South Dakota met Sarah Palin last summer in Baltic.
Sarah never officially endorsed her but Annette got in trouble anyway:
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota authorities on Wednesday arrested defeated U.S. Senate candidate Annette Bosworth and charged her with multiple counts of perjury and filing false election documents, saying she fraudulently attested to gathering voter signatures when she was really on a Christian mission trip to the Philippines.
South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley charged Bosworth with six counts of perjury and six counts of filing false documents related to election campaign laws. The arrest warrant was served a day after Bosworth lost the Republican primary with just 6 percent of the vote.
"The election complaints received by the Secretary of State involve conduct that is serious, deliberate, and must be addressed in order to preserve the integrity of our elections," Jackley said in a statement. "Because this is a federal elected office, I have and will continue to discuss the investigation with federal authorities."
Jackley said the 42-year-old Bosworth was given notice of the warrant Wednesday morning and turned herself in to the Minnehaha County Jail. She was immediately released.
At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Bosworth called the charges "a political intimidation scheme" against her by Jackley, who was initially appointed to his position by former Gov. Mike Rounds. Rounds defeated Bosworth and three other Republicans Tuesday night to capture the GOP nomination for the seat being vacated by retiring Democrat Tim Johnson.
"We still believe this is a political persecution," Bosworth said in a prepared statement. She did not take questions.
Annette also read a chapter from Sarah's playbook, the one where you play the victim:
Embattled former Senate candidate Annette Bosworth said Attorney General Marty Jackley is prosecuting her for both political and personal reasons on Friday.
"Marty Jackley's goal is not justice, it's revenge," Bosworth said in a news conference in her medical office. "He's trying to take away my medical license. If he can't get a criminal conviction or an admission of guilt, he's going after my livelihood again."
A felony conviction could be grounds for Bosworth to lose her medical license. Several years ago, she reached a settlement with the attorney general's office over alleged Medicaid fraud in which Bosworth didn't admit any wrongdoing.
"Marty Jackley wants to destroy me and he won't be satisfied until he does," she said.
Bosworth talked about the potential consequences of the 12 felony charges, each of which has a maximum penalty of two years in prison and a $4,000 fine.
"Marty Jackley wants me shackled and locked in a cage, unable to see my children graduate from high school or college," she said.
But Bosworth is highly unlikely to see prison time, even if convicted on all counts. Under South Dakota's 2013 criminal justice reform, low-level nonviolent felonies like she's charged with have a presumption of probation instead of prison.
Jackley has previously said he is charging Bosworth and another former candidate, Clayton Walker, because their offenses were "serious, deliberate and must be addressed in order to preserve the integrity of our elections."
Bosworth has also said Jackley's prosecution is political because he has raised money for Bosworth's primary opponent, Mike Rounds.
"The election is over," Jackley said. "The attorney general does not have the luxury of taking a pass or a walk on tough issues. Her conduct and statements pertaining to this situation speak for themselves."
At her news conference Friday, Bosworth declined to answer questions about the substance of the charges, citing legal advice. Specifically, she wouldn't say whether she didn't read or understand the oath she signed that people were signing her petitions in her presence.
Bosworth has admitted that multiple people signed her petitions when she wasn't there, despite signing the oath to the contrary. She said on Friday that she hadn't realized she was doing anything wrong.
"These were real people who were supporters of mine. They aren't fake, and they aren't dead," Bosworth said. "Why would I knowingly and intentionally perjure myself to obtain signatures of legitimate voters and supporters?"
She and a spokesman, Lee Stranahan, drew a contrast with Walker. He's accused of making up fake voters for his petitions. Bosworth's violations of the law, Stranahan said, are much less serious.
And Annette Bosworth isn't the only one in trouble:
Barring some disaster, Chris McDaniel’s tea party-backed primary challenge to Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran looked likely to succeed on Wednesday morning. After all, McDaniel already weathered one lurid scandal in which four supporters were arrested for allegedly plotting a nursing home break-in. Surely his campaign could make it to the June 24 runoff without another bizarre police investigation, right?
Well, maybe not. The Hinds County Sheriff’s Office announced Wednesday that it was investigating three McDaniel supporters who were locked inside the local courthouse, where primary ballots were held, on election night.
Unlike the nursing home arrests, which involved prominent backers of McDaniel but no one directly tied to the campaign, the courthouse lock-in included a top McDaniel staffer, campaign coalition director Scott Brewster.
According to the McDaniel campaign it was an innocent misunderstanding. The campaign said it had dispatched three people to the courthouse to monitor the outstanding election night count, and they were accidentally stuck. They then called the local county executive, Pete Perry, a Cochran supporter, for help.
The sheriff’s office, however, isn’t convinced. The investigation is driven by the McDaniel supporters’ inability to get their story straight, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office said.
“There are conflicting stories from the three of them, which began to raise the red flag, and we’re trying to get to the bottom of it,” Othor Cain, a spokesman for the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department, told TheClarion-Ledger on Wednesday. “No official charges have been filed at this point, but we don’t know where the investigation will lead us.”
Oh and Julianne Ortman went down in flames at the Minnesota GOP convention.BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Sen. Thad Cochran's campaign has released a voice mail from opponent Chris McDaniel's campaign manager, state Sen. Melanie Sojourner, to Cochran campaign manager Kirk Sims about the arrest of a political blogger accused of sneaking into the nursing home room of Cochran's bedridden wife and posting images of her.
The Cochran campaign says the message appears to contradict the McDaniel campaign's statements that it knew nothing before the arrest about the blogger and McDaniel supporter.
A McDaniel campaign spokesman on Sunday said "we are shocked and appalled, by how the Cochran campaign is using the actions of a sick individual to slander Chris McDaniel."
Sojourner initially tells Sims in the Saturday voice message that "We don't know this guy. We have no idea who he is."
But then later she says: "There was some stuff several months ago where this guy was doing some insane stuff online. We found out about it and Chris and I immediately sicced a bunch of volunteers trying to find out who was the source of just a lot of ugly rumors and nasty stuff and we wanted it squashed ..."
The Cochran campaign has questioned what McDaniel's campaign knew about Clayton Kelly, 28, of Pearl before he was arrested Friday night by Madison police. He faces a charge of exploitation of a vulnerable adult. He is accused of sneaking into Rose Cochran's nursing home room, photographing her and using the photo in an April 26 video hit piece opposing Cochran and in support of McDaniel. The video was pulled down within a couple of hours of going online.
McDaniel and his campaign on Saturday disavowed knowledge of Kelly and at one point even of the arrest before news of it broke midmorning.
But Sojourner, in the 7:41 a.m. voice mail message, said she had "been up most of the night, got some information about an arrest that occurred and Kirk, I need Chris to speak to Sen. Cochran."
She said McDaniel "is very upset about it and needs to have a personal phone call certainly with you, but he really wanted to have one with Sen. Cochran if you think that would be at all possible."
Sojourner said, "from day one I have just demanded that our staff not get involved in certain aspects about Sen. Cochran's personal life. This is a campaign about political issues."
McDaniel campaign spokesman Noel Fritsch on Sunday said that on April 26th, "the campaign became aware of a highly offensive internet video."
"We immediately instructed staff that this was out of the bounds of politics, and we should make sure no one associated with our campaign gave any credence to the video," Fritsch said. "... Everyone knows we had nothing to do with this, and the insinuations otherwise are shameful and have no place in the campaign."
As you are all aware, Sarah endorsed Chris back in April
As of right now Sarah has not only not condemned Chris's knowing of what was going on but released this video as well towards the end of the video Chris makes an appearance:
Man I need to stock up on more popcorn!
Also Palin BFF Karen Handel went down in flames on Tuesday:
In Georgia, businessman David Perdue and the Chamber-backed U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston advanced to a GOP runoff. U.S. Reps. Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey, the race's two most flamboyant, conservative Republicans, didn't come close. Not even the Sarah Palin-backed Karen Handel made the runoff.
She has endorsed Chris McDaniel, US Senate candidate from MS:
TW Shannon, US Senate candidate from OK, guess she has to get her token black
Ben Sasse, US Candidate from Nebraska, looks like one of those fundie homeschooling candidates
Unfortunately the Palin curse has hit early, Ben has been exposed as a hypocrite:
Nebraska Republican Ben Sasse has built his Senate campaign on his opposition to Obamacare — but he once consulted for a firm that was working to implement it.
Sasse provided early “strategic advice” to former Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt’s health care consulting firm while the firm pitched itself to clients in early 2010 to help implement the Affordable Care Act. Sasse is listed, along with his photograph and biography, as a “senior advisor” under the heading “Leavitt Partners team” in PowerPoint presentations from April and May 2010 in which Leavitt’s firm sold its Obamacare expertise.
I'm thinking Sarah got in trouble from the FEC for her piddly campaign contributions so she needs to start actually supporting a few candidates, unline 1-2 a year like she used to.
