Davis campaign changes tune

Southaven Mayor Greg Davis’s (R) special-election campaign on Wednesday struggled to explain abnormally long delays in its Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings days before a special election for a Mississippi House seat that Republicans are desperate to win.

Davis’s campaign on Wednesday filed its first 48-hour report since Friday. That followed another span of eight days between 48-hour reports, which are due within two days of receiving any contribution of $1,000 or more in the weeks immediately preceding an election.

{mosads}Davis is competing against Prentiss County Chancery Clerk Travis Childers (D) in a runoff Tuesday to replace Rep. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who is now in the Senate. The election holds great significance for both parties and is crucial for the GOP, as Democrats took their second GOP seat Saturday by winning a special election in Louisiana.

Republican leaders on Tuesday pleaded with GOP members to contribute more to Davis’s campaign.

Officials for Davis’s campaign gave various reasons for the lapses in FEC reports.

Davis campaign spokesman Ted Prill initially told The Hill that the campaign was under the impression that weekends didn’t count toward the 48-hour window, which along with a lack of large contributions explained the long spans between reports. FEC rules, however, state that weekends count just like regular days.

Davis’s campaign treasurer, Chuck Roberts, then said the campaign merely didn’t check its mail for contributions over the weekend because nobody was at the office, meaning that anything sent over this past weekend wasn’t actually received until Monday.

The FEC generally tells candidates that they should count delivery time as time of receipt, instead of when they pick something up.

According to the FEC website, since the end of the last filing period, April 23, Davis had filed just two 48-hour reports before Wednesday, leaving spans of several days in which his campaign reported no contributions of $1,000 or more.

Prill and Roberts both said there were indeed long spans with no large contributions.

“We didn’t receive any other contributions that were over the $1,000 limit until the 30th, which is why we filed again on the 2nd,” Roberts said.

The report filed Friday showed contributions from April 30 through Friday, totaling more than $100,000.

A 48-hour report with contributions totaling $47,000 was posted late Wednesday afternoon to the FEC website.

Roberts said the campaign was set to file another shortly, and 48-hour reports would probably follow almost daily as Tuesday’s election approaches.

Most candidates in expensive races file the reports every few days in the run-up to Election Day in order to stay in compliance.

Prill pointed out that Childers filed his pre-runoff report late. The report, which was due Thursday, was filed on Friday, according to the FEC website.

Childers’s campaign did not comment by press time.