Meet Mitzi Bickers

A scandal-plagued Democratic operative worked the black vote for Cochran

Meet what appears to be one of the keys to Thad Cochran’s black-turnout operation, Mitzi Bickers.

She is, from all appearances, something of a renaissance woman: She is not only the pastor of Atlanta’s Emmanuel Baptist Church but also a former president of the Atlanta school board, a former construction-company executive, and a Democratic staffer and political strategist with a checkered past. Last year, she left her job as a senior adviser to Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed after news surfaced that she had filed a fraudulent financial-disclosure statement.

In a bizarre turn of events, it seems that Bickers was in the middle of a bitterly contested Republican Senate primary. Two Atlanta-based entities affiliated with Bickers, The Bickers Group and the Pirouette Company, were paid thousands of dollars to make robo-calls on Senator Cochran’s behalf by a super PAC that backed Cochran in his bid for reelection. Documentsfiled with the Federal Election Commission show that Mississippi Conservatives, the political-action committee run by former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s nephew Henry, paid the groups a total of $44,000 for get-out-the-vote “phone services.”

On Tuesday, Cochran narrowly defeated his insurgent challenger, Chris McDaniel, in a runoff election that was nasty and personal from the outset. In fact, McDaniel has yet to concede the race, saying that he is looking into “rampant” voting irregularities and calling on state election officials to release voter data.

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