AOSHQDD: Where Things Stand in Mississippi (Updated)

Update: this thread came a bit late on Friday, and with tomorrow's election on a lot of people's minds, I've updated it to include our weighted poll average and a link to county-by-county breakdown as a percentage of the vote

Weighted Poll Average created Saturday 5/31/2014
Poll average includes the RRH and Harper polls, along with the Chism Strategies poll released over the weekend and The Polling Company's release two weeks ago:

We will be covering returns out of Mississippi and Iowa Tuesday night, and my money for the most interesting contest is on Mississippi for obvious reasons.

Unlike in every overhyped "establishment versus Tea Party" primary battle, McDaniel actually stands a chance of defeating Senator Cochran, or, at the least, of forcing a run-off race.

A few Tea Party polls showed McDaniel up, and even disregarding them for bias, the primary is Cochran's toughest election in decades. A Harper Poll released today found him up by only 5, 45% to 40%, and a just-released Red Racing Horses poll (the same guys who accurately called FL13) find Cochran up by a single point. The RRH poll is the most interesting, because it breaks down the vote by congressional district. Which means map time.

I created the top map by roughly comparing the counties in how they broke down in the last establishment/anti-establishment in the state, which would have been the Presidential primary in 2012. In many counties, Romney came in third or a distant second, and these have been labeled red. In the counties he carried, they have been colored green. You may note only 25 counties are labeled- these account for over 86% of the total primary vote in a non-Presidential election (used figures from 2011, the gubernatorial primary, for full disclosure).
Counties colored in blue are numerous in CD 2, a district that, per RRH, McDaniel is doing very well in (see map 2). The problem? Nobody casts Republican primary ballots here.

For a detailed chart of which counties cast the most and least, click here.

Many counties within saw fewer than 50 votes cast in the 2011 cycle, and one cast only 4 in both that and the 2012 Presidential one. CD2 accounted for just 15% of the voters polled in the state by RRH, roughly equal to it's contribution during a Republican primary.
Cochran's lead per this poll is entirely out of the third congressional district. You'll notice it has a high concentration of "big vote" counties. McDaniel keeps things tight by edging Cochran in the largest-by-number-of-voters district, CD4. But he will need to do a lot better in counties that may favor the Senator, like Harrison and Jackson.

In the event that the election turns out to be a real squeaker, the states in purple on the first map will come more into play, but expect a very, very long night in that case: in prep for our coverage of the race, we contacted every circuit clerk in the state, and an overwhelming number of them in the purple counties insisted nothing will come in for over an hour and a half.

Whatever shakes out, my team is ready to roll.

posted by CAC at 06:20 PM

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