Politics
Sen. Cochran’s Strategy to Draw Black Democrats to Polls Appears to Have Worked
U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., addresses supporters and volunteers at his runoff election victory party Tuesday, June 24, 2014, at the Mississippi Children’s Museum in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
Rosalind S. Helderman, WASHINGTON POST
Phillip Bump, WASHINGTON POST
JACKSONVILLE, Miss. (The Washington Post)—In an e-mail sent late last week, the black Democratic mayor of Vicksburg, Miss., urged 2,000 supporters to vote Tuesday for Sen. Thad Cochran, crediting the Republican for securing federal money for key local projects and calling him one of the city’s “best economic development tools.”
The voice of an African American state lawmaker was heard in a recorded phone call Tuesday asserting that Cochran stood between the state and a tea party conservative who would do away with government services. And full-page ads in black newspapers lauded the senator as a champion of historically black colleges.
An intensive strategy over the past three weeks to draw black voters to the polls and spare Cochran from what once seemed like a certain defeat at the hands of a tea party challenger in Tuesday’s GOP runoff appears to have worked.
