This has got to be one of the dumbest fundraising stunts ever:
[Thad Cochran primary opponent Chris] McDaniel announced he is offering up to 15 bounties valued at $1,000 each. The bounties are being offered "for evidence leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in voter fraud on or leading up to the June 24, 2014, Republican primary runoff election in Mississippi," according to a new webpage on the campaign's site.
And how do they plan to pay these bounties? With fresh new donations from
their loyal base tea party suckers:
... they [the McDaniel campaign] are asking people to contribute $15 to help fund them. Neither the email nor the webpage says what will happen to the money if no rewards are paid out.
Anyone putting their money up for this fund is a complete idiot, but what's really dumb about the new McDaniel gambit is that it puts the lie to his claims to have already uncovered thousands of examples of illegal voting.
If he actually had such evidence, you'd think he'd have released it by now instead of sitting on it, because with each day that goes by, the harder it gets to undo Cochran's victory—but you can be damn certain he wouldn't be going on trolling expeditions like promising a $1,000 bounty.
In the absence of any real evidence to support a legal challenge, the only way McDaniel can really stick it to Cochran is by running a write-in campaign, but even that would be a longshot. Still, he'd have a better chance at derailing Cochran that way than by offering this crackpot bounty program.