While Mississippi Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann goes into Tuesday’s Republican primary with far more money available than his far-right challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, the top conservative megadonor in America is doing his part to help the challenger pull off an upset for this powerful post.
McDaniel first rose to national prominence in 2014 when he nearly ousted the late Sen. Thad Cochran in a nasty primary runoff in this dark red state, a defeat the challenger never accepted. (Like Donald Trump, he was still insisting years later that he believed he’d won.) His contest with Hosemann has likewise been an ugly and expensive affair.
Mississippi Today’s Geoff Pender reports that a super PAC called Invest in Mississippi raised $885,000 through late July, with a little more than half of that cash coming from dark money groups that don’t need to disclose their donors. However, the balance was from Save Our Constitution PAC, an Ohio-based organization funded almost entirely by Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein. Save Our Constitution PAC was founded this year to pass a constitutional amendment in Ohio that would make it far harder to ever change the state’s governing document again, but it also seems to be functioning as a vehicle for Uihlein to direct some of his largesse toward the Magnolia State.
Invest in Mississippi has been using that money to air ads accusing Hosemann of having “served as the vice president of the South Jackson Women’s Clinic, an abortion clinic that has since been shuttered.” These allegations first surfaced all the way back in 1998 when Hosemann sought the GOP nod for a U.S. House seat, prompting his current campaign to reissue a 25-year-old memo from the clinic’s president attesting that the facility didn’t perform abortions while the candidate was affiliated with it. (Hosemann went on to win the nomination but lose to Democratic Rep. Ronnie Shows.)
McDaniel, however, was not remotely appeased. “Frankly, I don’t trust the word or the credibility of an abortion doctor in any event,” he told the Mississippi Free Press. The state senator repeated the same charges days later at the Neshoba County Fair while still insisting that, despite labeling his opponent “Delbert the Democrat,” he has “respect for Delbert Hosemann.” Hosemann responded, “If he respected me, he’d pull his ads today. He knows they’re lies.”
That hasn’t been the only line of attack that McDaniel has been employing, though. The lieutenant governor controls committee assignments in the 52-member Senate, including chairmanships, and Hosemann has handed out gavels to 13 of the 16 members of the Democratic caucus.
While all of Hosemann’s recent Republican predecessors, including now-Gov. Tate Reeves, have appointed similar numbers of Democratic chairs, McDaniel has pledged to end the practice. (The chamber has a total of 41 standing and joint committees, the vast majority of the Senate’s 36 Republicans run a committee; Pender notes that, while there’s no rule against having one senator chair multiple panels, that would create a “heavy workload” for one person to handle.)
The incumbent, though, hasn’t been afraid to go on the offensive himself. Hosemann filed a complaint months ago accusing McDaniel of breaking campaign finance law by setting up a PAC that raised $475,000 from a Virginia-based dark money organization, which in turn shipped almost all of those funds to McDaniel’s campaign—far, far beyond the legal donation limit of $1,000.
McDaniel, who blamed the transaction on “clerical errors,” ultimately returned the money and closed the PAC; Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch has shown no obvious interest, though the Friday before the election, she did announce an investigation into separate allegations regarding Invest in MS. McDaniel went on to argue that the problem lay with the state’s campaign finance laws, not anything he did; Mississippi Today noted, “Oddly, McDaniel during his long tenure as a state senator loudly championed stricter campaign finance laws and transparency for the public on sources of political money.”
Hosemann has also used the last week of the campaign to argue that his opponent likely doesn’t actually live in his southeastern Mississippi Senate district, which would mean he’d voted illegally. The lieutenant governor cited work by journalist William Browning, who reported last month that McDaniel’s home in Ellisville doesn’t appear to have used much, if any, water from May 2020 to March 2023. (McDaniel also spent 2014 asking if Cochran still lived in Mississippi.)
The challenger has pushed back by insisting that this house “remains occupied and central to the McDaniel family’s daily lives” but claims he’s been “forced to spend nights elsewhere” because of a black mold infestation. (McDaniel did not respond to Browning’s inquiries if that “elsewhere” is located in his district.)
However, while McDaniel said he would have to “tear out part of the walls and the flooring” to remediate the problem, Browning, who lives less than a mile from the residence, wrote that he’d never seen any sign of work being done and reported that other Ellisville residents “have told me over the years that the place is unoccupied.” A reporter for the Clarion Ledger and Hattiesburg American also showed up at a later date and discovered “no activity at the house.”
Hosemann, for his part, has held a huge financial lead throughout the campaign, and he went into the final days with a giant $2.09 million to $307,000 cash on hand advantage. The lieutenant governor also publicized endorsements during the final week of the campaign from U.S. Sens. Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith, both of whom have a history with McDaniel.
McDaniel launched a primary bid against Wicker in 2018 only to quickly switch races after a special election was called to succeed Cochran, who had resigned for health reasons. But the state senator, despite support from Uihlein, had trouble gaining traction against Cochran’s appointed successor, Hyde-Smith, and he came nowhere close to beating her.
The Hosemann-McDaniel showdown may not wrap up on Tuesday, though, because of the presence of a little-known third contender named Tiffany Longino. Mississippi requires candidates win a majority of the vote in order to avoid an Aug. 29 runoff, and if things are tight enough, Longino could keep either of her opponents from hitting that threshold.
McDaniel himself found out the hard way nine years ago how much of an impact one minor candidate could have when he outpaced Cochran 49.5-49.0 only for Some Dude Thomas Carey to take the remaining 1.5%; Cochran used the extended three-week campaign to encourage the state’s heavily Democratic Black electorate to vote in the runoff, a strategy that resulted in the incumbent’s 51-49 win. McDaniel and his allies responded by arguing in court that Democratic voters had illegally voted in the GOP primary (the state has no party registration) and demanded a new election, which he never got.
We haven’t seen any polling here in months to indicate whether things are close enough for a similar thing to happen again, however. But whoever wins the GOP nomination in August, whether it’s this Tuesday or three weeks hence, will be the favorite in the fall against Ryan Grover, who has the Democratic side to himself.
This story has been updated to reflect the news that Attorney General Lynn Finch is investigating Invest in Mississippi
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