Brett Favre is known for his comeback victories on the football field, and now the legendary NFL quarterback is lending his star power to U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, who's gunning to keep his seat in the Mississippi Senate race.
Cochran is slated to face Mississippi Rep. Chris McDaniel in a June 24 Republican runoff, a race that is especially heated after McDaniel defeated the incumbent in the
first round of primaries earlier this month, according to Politico.
So now Cochran is bringing out the big guns — a new ad blitz featuring Favre.
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"I've learned through football that strong leadership makes the difference between winning and losing," Favre says in the ad, released Wednesday by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "And when it comes to our state's future, trust me: Mississippi can win and win big with Thad Cochran. Thad Cochran always delivers, just like he did during Katrina."
Favre is a hometown sports hero who grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi, before going on to play football at Southern Mississippi University. After retiring from the NFL, where he made two Super Bowl appearances with the Green Bay Packers, he coached football at Oak Grove High School in Hattiesburg, where he helped lead the team to a state title last December.
Even before U.S. House Republican leader Eric Cantor was upended in his Virginia primary race, many predicted that Cochran would face a strong fight from Tea Party challenger McDaniel. But the Cantor loss has put new energy into the runoff, leaving Cochran to turn to Favre for help.
"Cantor was part of the same establishment that Thad has become,"
Carl Ford, 77, a bankruptcy lawyer, told The New York Times last week. "I think [Dave] Brat and McDaniel, they had the same platform."
Though McDaniel doesn’t have an all-star quarterback in his corner, he does have FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth, according to The Times. FreedomWorks has helped with 40,000 new lawn signs and 10,000 bumper stickers while the Club for Growth has pumped $3 million into the race on McDaniel's behalf.
"Millions in this country feel like strangers in this land — you recognize that, don’t you?" McDaniel said at a campaign rally in rural Covington County in March. "An older America passes away, a new America rises to take its place. We recoil from that culture. It's foreign to us. It's offensive to us."
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