OXFORD, Miss. — As Sen. Thad Cochran faces a potentially career-ending primary challenge, his strategy for victory is straightforward: Stress his decades of bringing home federal largesse and his long relationships with home-state Republicans; tap Washington rainmakers to fill his campaign account; and bring in Mississippi political legends like Haley Barbour and Trent Lott to help seal the deal.

Cochran’s opponent in the June 3 showdown, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, is practically salivating over the contrast that it represents.

As the 2014 election cycle begins to accelerate, perhaps no race presents a sharper difference of views on what it means to be a Republican or offer a sharper microcosm of the ongoing GOP civil war than the race in Mississippi.

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And as other GOP primary challengers around the country have faltered, no candidate has emerged as a greater intraparty threat to a sitting senator than McDaniel, a fast-talking 41-year-old litigator who explicitly promises to shatter the status quo of Mississippi’s relationship with Washington. The brash state lawmaker trashes Cochran’s record as an appropriator for their poor home state as a travesty of spending and debt. He has vacuumed up cash from out-of-state conservative groups and names as inspirations both Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a pair of neophyte tea party heroes with whom McDaniel says he has conferred about the race.

“If we’re able to defeat Thad Cochran in this primary race — he’s been there 41 years — do you know the shock waves it’ll send through the system?” McDaniel asked a hushed audience of more than 100 in a cavernous atrium at the University of Mississippi on Thursday. “We have to shake the establishment.”

McDaniel’s bid to topple Cochran has stirred intense passions here in the Deep South state that has prized longevity in its politicians for generations, relying on the pipeline of federal dollars that only senior appropriators like Cochran can ensure. The state has elected only five senators since World War II; since 1978, Cochran has been one of them.

The senator and his allies proudly tout Cochran-backed legislation that delivers for Mississippi, like the recent five-year farm bill that hard-right national groups opposed. An old-school Senate power broker, Cochran shrugged to a local TV interviewer this week: “The tea party, you know, is something I don’t really know a lot about.”

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The early skirmishes in the race have been bitter enough that state and national Democrats have wondered if they could be looking at a repeat of the 2012 Indiana Senate race, when a hard-edged challenger turned out longtime GOP Sen. Dick Lugar only to lose the general election. The Mississippi Democratic Party, which has struggled to field competitive statewide candidates in any race in recent years, intends to poll the contest this month. Former Congressman Travis Childers is in talks with national Democrats about entering before the March 1 deadline.

Anatomy of a takedown

Among the conservative activists challenging incumbent U.S. senators in 2014, McDaniel is the only one to receive the unanimous support of all the powerful outside groups that fuel campaigns on the right. When he announced last October, he won instant endorsements from the Club for Growth, the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Madison project; FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Patriots followed only a little while later.

It didn’t happen by accident.

As early as the start of last summer, McDaniel was reaching out to national conservative groups — including SCF, FreedomWorks and the Club — to ascertain their interest in a challenge to Cochran. The operatives who met with him came away wowed and heard from local activists who had urged McDaniel as early as 2012 to consider a challenge to Cochran.

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“We heard he was looking into running for [the] House. We looked into him and heard so many good things about him that we pushed him to run for Senate,” said Daniel Horowitz, a strategist for the Madison Project.

McDaniel’s early outreach paid off handsomely. As of last week, the Club and the SCF had routed approximately $310,000 into McDaniel’s coffers, according to the two groups. (As of Dec. 31, McDaniel reported raising a total of $461,000 for his campaign.) He has hired the same consulting firm, Cold Spark Media, that is advising Kentucky activist Matt Bevin’s primary challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Sitting down after his Ole Miss speech at a restaurant a few blocks from campus, McDaniel described the outside spenders on the right as “absolute blessings to us.” He spoke admiringly of Cruz and Lee, explaining that he had spoken with both men and met several times with Lee. Asked what kind of advice he got from the upstart duo, McDaniel said it was much “the same type of advice I gave those students tonight.”

“Just that the country is worth defending, the country is worth saving and that it takes courage to do that,” McDaniel said. “That’s the message of our movement.”

(A Cruz spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. Lee’s spokesman said the senator’s conversations with McDaniel were “news to me.”)

An equal and opposite reaction

Once McDaniel announced, it took Cochran more than a month to confirm that he would run for reelection. In Mississippi, there was considerable speculation that after 41 years on the job — with legislative gridlock getting only worse — the stately incumbent had had enough.

That changed on Dec. 6, when Cochran confirmed he would seek another term. Since then, the Mississippi establishment and key parts of the national GOP apparatus have kicked into gear. A super PAC, dubbed Mississippi Conservatives, has formed to support him under the leadership of Henry Barbour, the Republican National Committee member and nephew of the former governor. Next month, sitting Gov. Phil Bryant, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and other top state officials will toast Cochran at a party banquet in heavily Republican Rankin County.

With at least some of the Republicans involved, there’s a level of indignation at what they see as opportunism on McDaniel’s part.

At a small, private super PAC event in Jackson earlier this month, Haley Barbour laced into McDaniel, deriding him as a conventional politician who arrived in Jackson with his finger in the wind and lurched right to exploit the tea party.

Lott, a longtime Senate colleague and sometime Cochran rival, said the senator’s campaign had reached out to ask whether he would record an ad to run in coastal Mississippi.

The former Senate GOP leader expects the state to reward Cochran for his contributions — which include harnessing federal funding for a dazzling array of research centers and academic buildings, helping pass the five-year farm bill that cleared the Senate in early February and, perhaps most important, the $10.5 billion hurricane relief measure enacted swiftly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“The spot I’m going to do, if they agree, is to talk about how valuable Thad was after Katrina,” Lott said. “When you’re from one of the poorest states in the nation, one of the things our constituents expect from us — me and Thad — is that you do what you can to help.”

If McDaniel has benefited from national activist money, Cochran’s finance report shows a different kind of out-of-state support: Of the $742,000 he raised last year, more than three quarters came from political committees, including esoteric Washington interests like the National Chicken Council PAC and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida.

J. Keith Kennedy, a former Cochran aide now at the Washington firm Baker Donelson, said the senator scarcely needed to ask for help at a recent event hosted at their offices. Kennedy said Cochran told attendees that he was “not at all taking [the race] for granted,” and alluded to McDaniel only in passing as a member of the state Legislature.

“He doesn’t need to make a pitch to me or any of the folks that were here,” Kennedy said. “I’ve known Sen. Cochran for 36 years, since he came to the Senate in 1978, and I’ve known no finer senator in the chamber.”

Cochran, who declined to be interviewed, is in Mississippi for campaign events this week. The senator kicked off his reelection bid with a tour around the state in January and told POLITICO in 2012 that he returns to Mississippi about 18 times a year.

The limits of insurgency

When McDaniel tells crowds that a victory for him would terrify the establishment, he’s not exaggerating — at least as far as Mississippi Republicans are concerned. When an Ole Miss student challenged McDaniel’s past description of Mississippi as a “welfare state,” McDaniel stood by that characterization. Electing him would mean discarding Cochran, the presumptive next chairman of the Appropriations Committee in a potentially Republican Senate, for an outsider vowing no special deliveries for his constituents.

“I’m not going to do anything for you,” McDaniel said on campus. “I’m going to get the government off your back, then I’m gonna let you do it for yourself.”

About an hour later and less than a mile away, speaking in the same fluid, confident patter, he hedged that statement. McDaniel said he was not prepared to take a position on either the federal farm bill or the Cochran-backed effort to fight rate hikes in flood insurance — two local issues for which assertive federal action is plainly popular.

“You can’t very well send 1,000 government promises to people and then pull the rug out from under them the next day. The people of the coast have come to depend upon that, to a certain extent,” McDaniel said on the flood insurance issue. “That’s not to say that, at some point, we don’t need some spending reform down there.”

And McDaniel repeatedly ducked questions about whether he would have voted for a Hurricane Katrina relief bill of urgent importance to Mississippi that McDaniel also described as laden with pork. “I would have to see the details of it. I really would,” McDaniel said. “That’s not an easy vote to cast.”

Pressed on the 2005 Katrina bill specifically, he conceded: “I probably would have supported it, but I don’t know enough about it. That’s just it.” McDaniel added that “some of the money [in the Katrina bill] was misspent,” arguing that when it comes to government spending: “It’s one thing to provide immediate storm relief and to protect people’s lives and property, it’s quite another to benefit campaign supporters.”

The state legislator declined to back up the implication that storm money was used in a corrupt fashion. Asked whether there was a specific instance of government abuse he had in mind, McDaniel responded: “Not that I can say.”

“I think the people of the coast understand that some of the money was misspent,” he said. “I’m not alleging that Sen. Cochran misspent it.”

A campaign spokesman reached out the morning after the interview to “clarify that Chris would’ve been a yes vote on the disaster bill.”

National ripples

Some elections seem destined to end up as barnburners. The Mississippi race may not be in that category: The two candidates are offering wildly divergent promises to the state and have such different approaches to the race, that one of them may well find he has made a catastrophic miscalculation well before Election Day.

For national Republicans, a defeat for Cochran would be another sign that the party is still in the throes of a “Logan’s Run” phase — that the base is determined to terminate any older, relatively complacent, politics-as-usual incumbent that it can get its hands on.

Still, as many red states have been gripped by tea party fever since 2008, not a single Deep South senator has been defeated in a GOP primary — or even seriously challenged. And locally, Mississippi’s conversion to the Republican Party is still recent enough that Cochran may avoid being typecast as an out-of-step relic.

Unlike Barbour and Lott, whose stars have dimmed in Mississippi as they have fully embraced the role of Washington insiders now that they are out of office, Cochran is almost universally liked on a personal level. Even within the state’s dwindling band of Democratic activists, he’s viewed as a decent and honorable man.

“What I know of Sen. Cochran, he served honorably and everything. I voted for him a whole bunch of times,” said Michael Bostic, an officer of the Central Mississippi Tea Party. “He is much more moderate than I am, but to dislike him? Absolutely not. I know he’s done some good for the state.”

Bostic added: “We’re in a different time now, is the thing.”