FiveThirtyEight on whether Dems made the difference for Thad:
It’s still too early--after the vote and in the morning--to definitively answer this question. We’ll need to look at the profiles of the individual voters, post-election surveys and precinct-level data. Until then, we have county-level results to go on, and that data suggests that traditionally Democratic voters provided Cochran with his margin of victory.
While acknowledging that Cochran's overture was desperately brilliant, the logic of Democrats' reciprocation escapes me. The Mississippi senator has been voting against the interests of working-class Mississippians for 36 years (more than 40, counting his House stint), so Democrats return him to the Senate to vote against their interests a bit more?
If there were some non-extinct species of liberal Republicanism, I'd understand. But Thad Cochran? Virtually all of this morning's coverage of last night's primary race has noted, here and there, that the ideological separation between Cochran and McDaniel is in reality tissue thin; their contest was mostly a battle between the loud and the quiet forces of modern conservatism, whose larger taxonomical genus lies in the family and kingdom of ... madness.
Better, far better, for Democrats to have helped send a shrill, Palin- and quiz-show-host-backed GOP lunatic rather than recycled sludge to Washington, just to expedite the party's demise. That I would have understood. What Mississippi's Dems did? I don't get it.