The last time a Democrat won a Senate race in Mississippi, the party’s candidate this year, Scott Colom, hadn’t been born.
Now Colom, the 43-year-old district attorney for several counties in northeast Mississippi, has top Democratic officials and donors increasingly hopeful that he could pull off the inconceivable and use this year’s poor political environment for Republicans to win a Senate race that just a few months ago was nowhere to be found on the party’s 2026 plans.
Colom’s campaign against Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) remains a long shot for the party, especially because Democrats are not as flush with campaign cash as they were in past elections and face a growing list of expensive targets in the fight to take back the Senate.
President Donald Trump won Mississippi by 23 percentage points in 2024. The last time a Democrat won a Senate race in the state was in 1982. And some Democrats, when asked about Senate campaigns in the state, recalled when former congressman Mike Espy spurred excitement in 2020 only to lose to Hyde-Smith by 10 points.
But Colom and other top Democrats argue this year is different. Trump is suffering from approval ratings at or near record lows in polls as voter anger grows over the war with Iran he began and rising prices he promised to control. Colom and others argue that an invigorated Democratic base and depressed Republican electorate in the state could lead to the unexpected.
“The wave doesn’t have to be humongous for us to capture Mississippi,” Colom told The Washington Post recently.
Colom argues that Democrats have struggled in Mississippi because they haven’t tried and that the party has been stuck in a vicious cycle: They are scared away by large Republican victories and decline to put real resources into the state, he says, so Republicans’ hold on power only grows.
National Democrats are “conditioned not to care about Mississippi,” Colom said. “To me, you can’t be a party that cares about working people if you don’t care about working rural people in Mississippi who are struggling.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) recently has taken an interest in Colom’s campaign, according to a person familiar with Schumer’s thinking, directing some of the party’s top donors to give to Colom and signaling support for a race that was not on Democrats’ map earlier this year.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, a group directed by Schumer, has not followed suit. While committee spokesperson Maeve Coyle called Colom “a strong candidate” who has “put Cindy Hyde-Smith on notice,” the committee had yet to put money toward the race.
Colom recently met with several Senate Democrats, including Schumer. Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), a possible candidate for president in 2028, will campaign with Colom along the Gulf Coast on Friday, and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia), another possible 2028 candidate, will campaign in the state later in the month.
Charles Taylor, executive director of the Mississippi state conference of the NAACP, said he believes rising costs are motivating all voters this year. But Black voters, in particular, sense that democracy itself is at stake, Taylor said, partly because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s gutting of minority protections under the Voting Rights Act and state legislative efforts to draw new, red-leaning congressional maps.
“It’s not like we are experiencing scenarios where we’re like, ‘Well, if we lose, we live to fight another day.’ It’s more like, ‘If we lose, the consequences are so dire that people are going to die,’” Taylor said, citing Mississippi’s decision not to expand Medicaid coverage and the Trump administration’s efforts to cut Medicaid and reduce federal assistance to the poor.
When the state legislature briefly considered redrawing Mississippi Supreme Court district lines over the summer in ways that would have further disadvantaged African American residents, he said, some 5,000 people turned out in the rain on a Wednesday to protest. The legislature abandoned the effort.
“That showed me that folks are motivated,” Taylor said.
To win the Senate race, Taylor said, Colom would need a huge turnout among Black Mississippians, who make up roughly 35 percent of the state’s voting population, plus about 25 percent of the White vote.
“Both things are hard to do but not impossible,” he said.
Colom is also benefiting from recent Democratic success in Mississippi. In 2023, Gov. Tate Reeves (R) won reelection by fewer than 27,000 votes, or about 3 percentage points, over Democratic challenger Brandon Presley — the tightest governor’s race in the state in more than two decades.
Republicans, for now, are not worried about the increased Democratic optimism. Mississippi has not been in any national Republican spending plans, multiple Republicans said, and a person familiar with the president’s plans told The Post that Trump has no plans to campaign in Mississippi, despite traveling to nearby Alabama this week.
Austin Barbour, a longtime Republican operative in Mississippi, said he is concerned about the national environment right now but “not concerned enough to think Cindy Hyde-Smith will lose.”
Barbour pointed to how Espy raised more than $12 million in 2020 and blanketed the state in ads. “He had so much money. He had serious campaign money. He was constantly on television,” Barbour said, and yet lost to Hyde-Smith.
Colom, by contrast, has raised only $2.3 million and hasn’t been able to put together the kind of ad campaign needed to pull off the upset, Barbour said.
Hyde-Smith largely looked to thwart Colom’s rise by tying the candidate to his party’s national brand and casting his campaign as a personal vendetta against her. Hyde-Smith blocked Colom’s nomination to be a federal judge in 2023. Bernadette Breslin, a spokesperson for Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, labeled Colom’s bid a “vengeance campaign.”
At her 2025 reelection announcement event, Hyde-Smith boasted about it. “He thought he was going to be a federal judge, and I blocked him,” the senator said to an applauding audience.
“Scott Colom is bankrolled by the radical left because he is in lockstep with their agenda,” said Jake Monssen, Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager.
Spending on the race has been minimal compared with more competitive races in bigger states. Campaigns and outside groups have spent $5 million on ads since the Mississippi primary in March. Hyde-Smith’s campaign has run, or plans to run, $1.3 million in ads, surpassing Colom’s by nearly $800,000. Neither candidate has raised significant money. Colom, however, recently has outraised his Republican opponent, bringing in $945,000 in the second quarter of this year compared with Hyde-Smith’s $781,000 in the same period.
Colom is now desperate for more outside spending, arguing to any donor who will listen that a win is possible.
“If we try, we win these voters,” Colom said. “They’ve been written off, not just by Cindy Hyde-Smith but also by other people in the Democratic Party. And I’m just not going to write them off.”
The post Political climate has so soured for GOP, even Mississippi Democrats are hopeful appeared first on Washington Post.
