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Mississippi: Democrat Childers Wins Congressional Race

May 14, 2008 — For the second time this month, Democrats have won a Deep South congressional seat previously considered safe Republican territory.

In Mississippi’s 1^st District (Tupelo, etc.), Travis Childers (D), the Prentiss County Chancery Clerk, scored a sound victory Tuesday over Southaven Mayor Greg Davis (R). With 461 of 462 precincts reporting, Childers had 56,982 votes (54%) to Davis’s 49,285 (46%). Childers carried 19 of the mostly rural district’s 24 counties, while Davis ran well mainly in his home county of DeSoto, a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee.

The Childers victory was all the more sweet for Democrats since President Bush carried the district with 62% in 2004.

The special election was to fill the unexpired term of Roger Wicker (R), who resigned to accept an appointment to the US Senate. In the April 22 vote, Childers led with 49%, just one percentage point shy -- 410 votes -- of victory.

Both national parties were strongly involved in the campaign. Vice-President Dick Cheney campaigned in the district on Monday, the day before the vote, on Davis’s behalf, as did Gov. Haley Barbour (R) and former US Sen. Trent Lott (R). The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spent $1.27 million in independent expenditures in the district. In addition, a conservative group, Freedom’s Watch, spent another $450,000.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) actually outspent the GOP, putting some $2 million into the race on Childers’s behalf. But Childers, a county official in Tupelo, the district’s unofficial capital, countered the GOP’s bringing in its big dogs by contending that he was counting on the “working people” in the district. He also assailed high gasoline prices and called Cheney “Big Oil’s best friend.” Childers was also helped by a broad network of Democratic officeholders in the 24 court houses in the district.

Childers’ strategy, like that of recently elected Congressman Don Cazayoux (D) elected earlier this month in Louisiana’s 6^th District, had two main pillars. First, he took a conservative stand on controversial social issues, like gun control and abortion, thus removing them from contention, and second, he took a strong populist -- or liberal, if you will -- position on economic issues.

This strategy, combined with adequate financing, some strong local issues like Davis’s residency in a suburb of Memphis on the far side of the district, overcame the Republican strategy of tying Childers to Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. This strategy, also used against Cazayoux, was outlined by NRCC chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) in a Washington, DC, news media briefing a few weeks ago. It has now failed to produce a victory for the second election in a row, both of them in conservative Southern districts where such an approach should work if it is going to work anywhere. The results also indicate that at this juncture, voters are placing more emphasis on economic concerns than on ideology, which should play to the Democrats’ advantage.

The Democrats weren’t above playing hardball either. Roll Call newspaper reported that the DCCC mailed a flyer to black voters accusing Davis of supporting the erection of a statue to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, in a Southaven park. Davis denied it, saying he only agreed to accept a statute of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, a Mississippian, which the city of Memphis was planning to remove. The district is 26% black.

Yesterday’s results bode well for the Democrats in several other potentially close congressional contests in the South, such as Alabama’s 2^nd District (Montgomery, etc.) and 5^th District (Huntsville, etc.), and in Georgia’s 8^th District (Macon, etc.), where the GOP hopes to gain a seat.