Ken Cuccinelli, the president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, said the GOP establishment’s shenanigans and race-baiting in the Mississippi Senate primary may have also hurt conservative candidates in Kansas and Tennessee.
In an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday, Cuccinelli blasted the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) for enabling Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) and his campaign to use race-baiting tactics to court Democrats.
Cuccinelli said when the Mississippi Senate primary dragged on, “it [set] us back five weeks” in places like Kansas, where conservative Milton Wolf lost to Sen. Pat Roberts by seven points. Roberts, like Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), did receive a majority of the votes to underfunded opponents in their respective primaries this week. Other conservative groups that were focused on the Mississippi also had their resources tied up for weeks to the detriment of candidates like Wolf and Joe Carr, who challenged Alexander.
Cuccinelli also noted that Chris McDaniel won more Republican voters in both races against Cochran, and emphasized that the “liberal media partners with the NRSC in their assaults on us.”
He said winning over Democrats by playing the race card, which rightfully upsets conservatives when Democrats use it, and promising more welfare is “not expanding the Republican party.”
“That is trying to get Democrats to vote for you on a Democrat basis,” he said.
He said the “margins are getting smaller” for establishment candidates this year, and mentioned that “a lot of those weak-kneed Republicans” who funded the attacks in the Mississippi Senate runoff that painted Tea Partiers as racists are up for re-election in 2016.
Cuccinelli said that it was “disgusting” for liberals to attack Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) wife for being “Asian,” and McConnell should be “rightfully indignant about that.”
But then Cuccinelli asked, “Why is it okay for Mitch McConnell to fund… the same kind of attacks on Chris McDaniel in Mississippi?”