Black voters provided Cochran victory margin, data suggests

Sen. Cochran’s strategy to draw black Democrats to polls appears to have worked

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. Voter data shows that turnout rose sharply in Tuesday’s election in black areas of the state over the initial June 3 primary, a runoff made necessary when Chris McDaniel narrowly edged Cochran but was unable to win 50 percent of the vote.

That suggested that not only did traditionally Democratic black voters turn out on behalf of the state’s 76-year-old white Republican senator, but they may have provided his margin of victory. Mississippi’s open primary system allowed Democrats to vote in the GOP election, provided they had not participated in the June 3 Democratic primary.

In Mississippi’s 24 counties with a majority black population, turnout increased an average of 40 percent over the primary, according to a Washington Post analysis. In the state’s 58 other counties, the increase was only 16 percent.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sen-cochrans-strategy-to-draw-black-democrats-to-polls-appears-to-have-worked/2014/06/25/74d72932-fc8a-11e3-8176-f2c941cf35f1_story.html?