A curious question which bugs me about Republican Primary races such as this one.

But Mr. McDaniel was a tad tougher when he hosted a radio talk show. In one broadcast that surfaced Thursday, Mr. McDaniel suggested that he would move to Mexico rather than pay reparations to blacks over slavery, and he referred to Mexican women as “mamacitas.”
In another extended riff, he joked about female wrestlers and spoke with frustration about liberals who he said had denounced Sony for a scene in a PlayStation game in which a white woman was depicted holding down a black woman.
“The world’s gone nuts,” Mr. McDaniel said. “Well, she wasn’t holding down a gay guy.”

Mr. Cochran’s backers have for months tried to portray Mr. McDaniel as the next incarnation of Todd Akin of Missouri, Richard Mourdock of Indiana, Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Sharron Angle of Nevada, all Senate candidates who beat Republicans favored by the establishment in their primaries only to lose to Democrats in the general election.

And therein lies the question.  Is that the argument?  Don’t nominate this buffoon, because even if you agree with this buffoon a part of the electorate will judge him as a buffoon and let in some Democrat?  Is there any chance that 50 percent plus one of the Republican primary voters would choose to vote against this challenger because they agree he’s “out of bounds”?

Mr. McDaniel has worked hard not to fit the bill, and he has portrayed himself as a Christian and a family man who is flummoxed by modern culture.

And is that a typo?  There might be some decent comedy material to garner from the premise, if you’re writing a sitcom, but otherwise I don’t know why you would want to “portray himself” as “flummoxed by modern culture”.

But in the clip, he asks how a man with a limited knowledge of Spanish would pick up a woman in Mexico. “Cómo está, señorita?” he asks. “What about mamacita? Mamacita works. You say that at the wrong place, the wrong time, you will get beat down.”
“I’m an English-speaking Anglo,” he continued. “I have no idea what it means actually, but I’ve said it a few times, just for, you know, fun. And I think it basically means, ‘Hey, hot mama. You’re a fine looking young thing.’ ”

So he hosted a standard garden variety morning zoo radio fest?

Bottom line, and why I hope the Cochran strategy is based more on “you finding him distasteful” and not “your fellow voters finding him distasteful”…

Cochran supporters have said a McDaniel victory in the Republican primary on June 3 could give an opening to former Representative Travis Childers, who is expected to win the Democratic primary. Mr. Childers won his House seat in a special election in 2008 and was elected to a full term in the Democratic wave that fall, only to be swept out by the Tea Party in 2010.
But even against Mr. McDaniel, a Democrat would have a steep uphill climb. In 2012, President Obama lost the state by 11 percentage points. 

Better than Albert Gore, the last Senate candidate for the state, but I’m afraid the problem lies less in bridging the 11 percent gap (kind of did something like that in Indiana) and in the very much race-based stratification of the vote.  So… ratchet to the right, always ratchet to the right, and then… ?

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