Chris McDaniel makes his last, best case
“We did some post-election polling,” Tyner said, and “71 percent of [Democrats] said they would not support the Republican in the general election.” By using some “mathematical regression,” he argued, they could toss enough Democratic votes to be declared the winners.
In other words, the argument goes like this. Democrats voted in the runoff, which, even if it’s legal under Mississippi law, is a violation of the party’s nominating rules. Given the number of additional votes Cochran received in the runoff — more than a similar increase seen by McDaniel — the campaign clearly plans to argue that many of those votes were from Democrats and should be considered invalid. The McDaniel argument will almost certainly focus on the racial make-up of counties that saw an increase in turnout from the primary to the runoff to bolster its argument, which we can predict both because an early draft of its Rule 11(b) press release was explicit about the racial component, and because, last week, this reporter was contacted by Tyner to see if he might serve as an expert witness on the topic. (I declined.)
Washington Post
8/4/14
Magnolia Tribune
