Today, Sam Hall at the Clarion Ledger did a story about a pro-Chris McDaniel push-poll done by a local political activist named Paul Buisson. The poll was “paid for by Mississippi Citizens for Good Government”. MCGG is a registered LLC with the Secretary of State, but it is neither a non-profit nor registered as a political committee. Nor does it appear to be registered with the FEC, though it is clearly conducting campaign advocacy activity in a federal race.
You can hear the video here.
To make matters worse, Buisson, a self-styled ‘media consultant’, is (predictably) a Board Member of the Central Mississippi Tea Party (bet you couldn’t see that coming).
Bless his heart, his record in politics has been a bit checkered. He ran for Rankin County Supervisor in 2011 as a ‘tea party Republican’. He was also the ‘rocket surgeon’ listed as the polling contact for a 2010 poll that called the Bill Marcy/Bennie Thompson race “a dead heat”. (Editor’s note: Seen any of those polls lately?). Though the Marcy/Thompson shock poll had them only one point apart, Thompson of course whipped Marcy five weeks later by 24 points. So much for his candidate polling career.
As for the push poll, it certainly invites questions of who paid for it. Was it a PAC? Was it the Tea Party? Did they treat it like a campaign expense and report it? To complicate matters, MCGG solicits donations for their activity through their website.
Folks, we are entering the last two weeks where people you’ve never heard of and people you’ll never hear of again will beclown themselves by acting like unhinged zealots and running into the fray in an arena entirely beyond their pay grade.
It’s about to get weird by an order of magnitude. Buckle up. It’s going to be a wild two weeks.
Magnolia Tribune
