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GOP senator beats tea party rival in Miss.

 
Sen. Thad Cochran greets supporters of his re-election bid in Ocean Springs, Miss., on Tuesday. The Republican was first elected to the Senate in 1978 after serving six years in the House.
Sen. Thad Cochran greets supporters of his re-election bid in Ocean Springs, Miss., on Tuesday. The Republican was first elected to the Senate in 1978 after serving six years in the House.
Published June 25, 2014

WASHINGTON — In a remarkable political turnaround, six-term Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi edged out tea party-backed challenger Chris McDaniel Tuesday in a bruising, costly Republican runoff that pitted Washington clout against insistence on conservative purity.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Cochran had 51 percent to McDaniel's 49 percent, three weeks after McDaniel had beaten the veteran lawmaker in the initial primary round but had fallen short of a majority. In the three-week dash to the runoff, Cochran and his allies had highlighted his seniority and Washington clout, while McDaniel, 41, had argued that Cochran was part of a Washington blight of federal overspending.

The victory for a stalwart of the Senate Appropriations Committee was a fresh blow to the tea party movement, which spent millions to cast aside Cochran, 76, a mainstream Republican who won a U.S. House seat in President Richard Nixon's GOP wave of 1972 and has served in the Senate for more than three decades.

In another setback for the tea party, two-term Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma won the GOP nomination in the race to succeed Sen. Tom Coburn, who is stepping down with two years left in his term.

In the solidly Republican state, Lankford is all but assured of becoming the next senator. Part of the House GOP leadership, Lankford defeated T.W. Shannon, a member of the Chickasaw Nation and the state's first black House speaker, backed by former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, two stalwarts of the right.

The Mississippi contest was the marquee race on a busy June primary day that included New York, Oklahoma, Colorado, Maryland and Utah.

In New York's Harlem and upper Manhattan, 84-year-old Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel, a 22-term congressman and the third-most-senior member of the House, held a slight edge over state Sen. Adriano Espaillat, 59.

Rangel, one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus, drew criticism last month when he dismissed Espaillat as a candidate whose only accomplishment was to be a Dominican in a majority Latino district.