There were still “hangings, shootings, and assassinations” in the American South in 1968, the year Flonzie Brown-Wright became the first black woman elected to public office in post-Reconstruction Mississippi.
In a few days, she could see Mississippi send a black man, Democrat Scott Colom, to the U.S. Senate for the first time in 150 years..
“It feels like our time has come,” the 84-year-old civil rights activist said of Colom’s surprisingly strong campaign in deep red territory, where he leads the Republican incumbent by about 2,000 votes with only a few thousand ballots left to count. “In the South, even though we missed the ball at times, we kept our eyes on the trophy. »
On Tuesday, as they watched a “blue wave” sweep through Georgia, South Carolina and Texas, Democratic leaders in Washington were stunned when Colom, a 43-year-old prosecutor, edged out his Republican opponent. The last time a Democrat won a U.S. Senate seat in Mississippi was in 1982, when it was won by a segregationist.
As election night approached, polls showed Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith leading Colom by six points. With 97 percent of the votes counted as of Friday afternoon, Colom was ahead of Hyde-Smith by 0.3 percentage points.
We didn’t expect it to be this close. But in America’s poorest state — which Donald Trump won by 23 points two years ago — the groundwork for a potential upset had been quietly laid by a handful of strategists, who believed that energizing black and working-class voters could make Mississippi competitive.
“Mississippi was written off. They said it was a reliably red state, (but) no one actually sat down and did the math. We have a 38 percent black population,” said Brandon Presley, a mentor to Colom who lost his 2023 gubernatorial race by just under 27,000 votes.
“This,” he added, “marks the dawn of a new era in the South for Democrats.”
Presley admits it took a candidate “who had the kind of pizzazz that my cousin Elvis had on stage” to bring Democrats this close.
In what began as a sleeper race, Colom, who speaks with a disarming Southern drawl, has become a political rock star, holding more than 60 town hall meetings and appearing at several music festivals across the state’s 82 counties.
“I’ve been doing this for months… going out, talking, listening, learning and introducing myself,” Colom told reporters Thursday.
The Mississippians he met on the trail once believed in Trump’s “America First” message, but they were “betrayed,” Colom said. “They were promised lower grocery prices from day one. That didn’t happen.”
Colom’s “Mississippi Matters” campaign capitalized on this sentiment, releasing several viral videos — produced on a shoestring budget with the help of tech-savvy staffers and family members — that tapped into anger at the Trump administration over the cost-of-living crisis.
One ad relied on a comment from Colom’s opponent, Hyde-Smith, in which she dismissed concerns about rising beef prices by advising Mississippians to choose another protein. The 28-second spot featured a man grilling a hamburger, saying he “would rather choose another senator instead” and a woman suggesting Hyde-Smith “had lost his mind”.
Another ad showed Colom approaching Maga diehards lining up for a Trump rally and finding common ground with them on the president’s tariffs and the war in Iran.
Colom’s campaign also benefited from the participation of high-profile Democrats, including Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock and former President Bill Clinton, a native of neighboring Arkansas.
Touting his record as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, Colom won over many white voters who had soured on Trump, even flipping formerly Republican Forrest County, named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first “grand wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan.
But Colom — who today would be a federal judge if his nomination by Joe Biden had not been effectively blocked by Hyde-Smith in the Senate in 2023 — could ultimately be lifted to victory thanks to extremely high turnout in the Mississippi Delta, home to the highest concentration of Black voters.
Their enthusiasm for Colom left Democrats believing they could remain competitive in deep red states like Mississippi long after the Trump era ended. Some say the party missed an opportunity by not investing more resources in races in southern states this year.
James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist who grew up in Louisiana and helped raise money for Colom, told the FT it was “tragic” that the party did not see the potential to sweep the South.
On Tuesday, gubernatorial elections in Alabama and Tennessee were won by Republicans by razor-thin margins, while Trump’s party hemorrhaged support in Arkansas.
“If you talk to Democratic political types based in Washington, if you say Louisiana or Mississippi, they shut you down,” Carville said. He lamented that another black candidate, Louisiana Democrat Jamie Davis, came within 26,000 votes of victory on Tuesday.
“With a million dollars more,” he said, “we would have had a senator from Louisiana. »
For now, the urgency for Democrats is to make sure Colom crosses the finish line. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent party members and lawyers to Mississippi to observe the vote and prepare for a legal battle if Hyde-Smith contests the result.
But whatever the end result, veteran activist Brown-Wright, who worked closely with Martin Luther King, believes the success of Colom’s camp will sustain Democrats in the Deep South for years to come.
“It’s like a stepladder,” she said. “You go up one level at a time. »
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