District Attorney Scott Colom believes he can become Mississippi’s first Democratic senator in nearly 45 years. His confidence, he told MS NOW, comes down to math.
In 2023, Democrat Brandon Presley came within 27,000 votes — less than three percentage points — of unseating Gov. Tate Reeves. Two years later, Democrats broke a supermajority in the state Senate by flipping two seats in newly drawn, majority-Black districts following court-ordered special elections. Then came Colom’s own primary in March, when Democratic turnout rose by 70% — an increase of more than 62,000 raw votes — compared to 2018, the last time a Senate seat was up during a midterm year.
In March, “the gap between Republican and Democratic voters in Mississippi was only 8,000,” Colom told MS NOW. “That’s a historic turnout, and that shows that we had the momentum. We’ve been putting cracks in the glass.”
Taken together, he argued, the trend lines point to an energetic Democratic base slowly waking up after being dormant for decades when it had largely resigned itself to Republican control of every statewide and federal office. No Democrat has won a statewide race in Mississippi since Attorney General Jim Hood in 2015.
The history Colom is running against is steeper still: No incumbent senator has lost re-election in the state since 1942, and no Democrat has won a Senate race here since 1982.
His opponent, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, is the same Republican who single-handedly blocked his appointment to the federal bench. Trying to unseat her has required an aggressive campaign strategy. Colom has held more than 50 town halls. He has appeared at conservative gatherings like the Neshoba County Fair, canvassed public housing complexes and worked music festivals and sporting events in search of low-propensity voters. After a new state law added citizenship verification requirements to voter registration, his campaign partnered with groups like the NAACP and Fair Fight to reach people at risk from being booted from the rolls.
Earlier this month, the campaign launched the first general election advertisements of the cycle as part of a seven-figure paid media buy that will run across broadcast, radio, streaming and digital platforms through Nov. 3. The first spot introduces Colom’s two young daughters and highlights his Christian faith; the second touts his record prosecuting corruption. American Bridge, the Democrat-aligned super PAC, has said it will include Mississippi in ad campaigns hammering Republican incumbents for unpopular votes.
The strategy has won over some prominent Democrats — former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Maryland Sen. Angela Alsobrooks have both endorsed him — but not the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which has declined to invest significantly in a race the Cook Political Report still rates “solid Republican.”
Colom drew a distinction between the party leaders who have written Mississippi off and what he called the “dreamers,” like Buttigieg and Alsobrooks.
“We got one group of people that are treading water. They’re just the path of least resistance: ‘What’s the path that can get us just to 51?’” he said. “And you got people that are dreamers — people that dream of a party that can represent the whole country, that can actually have a senator in Mississippi, have a senator in Iowa … The people that are supporting me, I would call them dreamers.”
The current political environment, Colom said, has placed the “dream” of a blue Mississippi within reach.
Republican candidates have been left to defend an unpopular war that has driven up fuel prices and a tariff regime that could cost the average Mississippi household more than $2,000 a year. In a state with one of the nation’s highest poverty rates and the lowest per capita income, Colom is betting that the cost of living can move apathetic voters — and even some committed Republicans — to consider his campaign.
“There’s a lot of working-class people — small, small business owners, farmers that are getting really, really hurt because of these tariffs,” Colom said. “People of Mississippi are getting betrayed, and they know it, and they’re looking for the direction.”
But reaching these voters requires the kind of spending national Democrats have long refused to make here.
“The problem is we haven’t been trying,” Colom said, recounting a conversation with a Republican supporter about the 2024 election, when President Donald Trump won the state by nearly 23 points.
“I asked him, had he ever got a Democratic ad in 2024,” Colom began. “He got not one Democratic ad, not one Democratic mailer, not one Democratic text message, nothing. The Democratic Party did nothing to try to convince that person to vote for our party. And so surprisingly, the person didn’t vote for us.”
On Tuesday, MS NOW joined Colom on the trail as he sought to do just that — calling attention to what he characterized as Hyde-Smith’s inaction on affordability while taking a novel approach to connect with low-propensity voters.
Riding in a food truck emblazoned with “Scott for Senate,” he toured two historically Black colleges and universities, passing out tacos while staff registered students and alumni to vote. The food truck allowed students to pick their own protein — a reference to a widely criticized remark by Hyde-Smith, who said residents worried about rising beef prices should “choose” an alternative source of protein. It was not clear how many students caught the reference. What was clear was the opening it gave Colom to talk directly with young Black voters, some of whom described little enthusiasm for voting among their peers.
There’s “definitely more work that needs to be done,” said Muarib Abdul-Tawwab, 18, a political science major at Tougaloo University. “Young people aren’t inclined to go vote, or they’re not super motivated to go vote. It’s because as a people, we haven’t seen that really change our communities. … We see people go vote year over year over year, and then nothing changes.”
Jayse Thompson, a sophomore at Alcorn State University who hopes to become a radiation technician, registered after meeting Colom and picking up a taco. The conversation, he said, reminded him that “a vote can change anything and everything.”
“To be so close to somebody who is willing to run for office, and to see their mindset and to hear their mindset is actually kind of inspiring,” he said.
During a panel conversation with students earlier that morning at Tougaloo, Colom told the several dozen people gathered that “Mississippi isn’t a lost cause; it’s a betrayed cause.” Asked afterward what he meant, he turned his attention to Washington.
“When the country ignores places like Mississippi, inevitably, it costs the country,” Colom told MS NOW. “For too long, we’ve had people in D.C. — national Democrats — that have ignored Mississippi. They gave it up. They said we’re not going to even try to compete there. And the result of that has been terrible policies.”
Less than 50 days out from the November midterms, Colom said he is as optimistic as he was the night he won his primary. It is, he insisted, all in the numbers.
“Go do the research. The math makes sense for Mississippi. We have to compete in places like this, because we’re not going to be a national party if we don’t understand that Mississippi has to matter,” Colom said.”
Kayla McCormick contributed to this report.
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