On a recent Sunday morning at the Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in Natchez, Miss., a large sign facing the worshipers described the congregation’s goal for 2026: “The Year of Re-Alignment.”
The banner proclaimed a spiritual aspiration, not a political objective. But the warm shouts that greeted Scott Colom, the Democrat seeking one of Mississippi’s U.S. Senate seats, suggested hope for political change in a state that has not elected a Democratic senator in 44 years.
“Y’all,” Mr. Colom declared, “we need a realignment on so many fronts.”
President Trump’s unpopularity is opening vistas for Democrats in places they never expected to contest, and the party must decide how far it wants to extend its reach, even as it lags Republicans in fund-raising. Mr. Colom, a district attorney for four eastern counties, makes a persuasive case that his campaign against Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith deserves national attention and support. This really could be the year for a Mississippi miracle. He’s right: Democrats can make inroads in the Deep South and upend national politics. But the national party needs to show up.
Mr. Colom, a religious man who typically concludes conversations with “bless you,” insists that you don’t have to believe in miracles to think he can win a state Mr. Trump carried by nearly 23 points in the last election. The problem, as he sees it, is that Democrats have fallen into a vicious cycle by assuming that Mississippi is irretrievably Republican. They starve the state of resources, so potential supporters decide that Democrats have given up on them. The effect, Mr. Colom said in an interview at Johnny T.’s Bistro and Blues in Jackson, is that a party claiming to champion the working class is casting aside what he calls the country’s “most working-class state.”
“They want to be Democratic,” Mr. Colom said. “They want to believe that we’ll make their life better. They want to believe we care about working people. But they just have been frustrated that we haven’t competed in Mississippi.”
There is hard math behind Mr. Colom’s thinking. Mississippi Democrats start with a strong base in the Black community, which represents 37 percent of the population, the largest share of any state. The longstanding rule of thumb, as Mr. Colom’s pollster Margie Omero told me, is that a Democrat can win by securing high turnout among Black voters and roughly a quarter of the white vote.
In several recent elections, Democrats have come close to hitting the magic numbers. In 2023, Brandon Presley, a longtime member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission (and, yes, Elvis’s second cousin) came within roughly three points of defeating the Republican governor, Tate Reeves. In 2018, former Representative Mike Espy lost to Ms. Hyde-Smith by just over seven points. Like Mr. Colom, Mr. Espy ran in a year of revolt against Mr. Trump — and the anti-Trump backlash is even stronger now than it was then.
Mr. Colom has begun to turn skeptics into believers — or, at the least, into hope-mongers. One sign of his success: Sabato’s Crystal Ball, one of the leading adjudicators of what’s happening across the political map, recently shifted the Mississippi race Mr. Colom’s way. Sabato still judges the seat to be “likely Republican,” but the move away from “safe Republican” was an indication that even hard-nosed election analysts sense that something is happening.
Part of it is Mr. Colom’s relentless campaigning, including some 60 town halls. His energy was on display on a recent weekend when he worked a crowd at a Black rodeo in Greenwood, spoke about raising the minimum wage and protecting voting rights at Pilgrim Baptist, then did a Q. and A. at a community center. He closed there by leading his audience in a chant of his pithy campaign mantra: “Higher wages! Lower costs! Save health care! Save hospitals!”
Like many Democrats this year, Mr. Colom links his Christian faith to his politics. “When we talk about policy issues,” he told me, “we need to talk about it through a faith and values lens. Sometimes we talk about numbers, like we talk raising the minimum wage. We just need to raise the minimum wage because this is the proper thing to avoid inflation. No, people deserve the dignity of work. If somebody works, they deserve dignity, and that’s a values proposition to me.”
But there is a sharp, practical focus to his appeal: He knows the voters he needs to get and has a strategy for how to win them over. He believes that widespread economic anxiety and Mr. Trump’s broken promises create an opening for Democrats to begin winning back working-class voters, including whites. “There’s a lot of working-class people that we can get in Mississippi if we just talk to them about the issues we agree on,” Mr. Colom told me. “We haven’t made clear to them that we have their back.”
Former President Barack Obama encapsulated the campaign in a recently released ad. His imprimatur, along with campaigning in the state by Senators Cory Booker and Raphael Warnock and promised stops by former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, bolsters Mr. Colom’s case for making his race a priority.
“Scott is a devoted husband and dad, a seventh-generation Mississippian,” Mr. Obama declared. “Guided by his Christian faith, Scott made his community safer prosecuting violent crimes as district attorney and fighting corruption in Columbus. Now he’s running for Senate to raise wages, lower costs, and save your health care and hospitals.” The first half casts Mr. Colom as a safe pair of hands who shares voters’ values. The second places economic issues front and center.
They form the core of his critique of Ms. Hyde-Smith, whom he sometimes refers to as “Cindy High Prices.” With inflation a central issue everywhere, she gave him an unexpected opening when a local television interviewer asked her about the rising price of beef. She replied, “You know you have so many proteins to choose from.”
In a digital ad that went viral, voters mocked her answer. “Pick another protein?” one asks incredulously. “I’d rather pick another senator myself.” One of Mr. Colom’s innovations has been a food truck run by his wife and their 8- and 9-year-old daughters, who give away tacos at events on college campuses and at housing projects and community gatherings. Lately, they have taken to referring to the truck’s chicken or beef taco offering as a “pick your protein taco.”
Senator Warnock, first elected in a dramatic December runoff after President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, alluded to the not-so-behind-the-scenes battle over whether national Democrats should add Mississippi to the growing list of states in which they’re investing. “Believe me when I say Mississippi has the ingredients of our win in Georgia, and then some,” he said. “I’m also pushing the Democratic Party to invest more in the South. I think the Democratic Party fails to invest in the South at its own peril.”
Although he would make history if he wins, Mr. Colom plays down the prospect of being the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction. “That’s not a motivating factor for me,” he said, and argued that it’s far less meaningful to voters than health care cuts, high prices and Mr. Trump’s “betrayal” of his 2024 campaign promises. Voters, he insists, are not interested in who is “first.”
At the same time, he identifies with the anger of Black voters over the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, which this year further eviscerated the Voting Rights Act and allowed states to eliminate districts likely to elect Black members of Congress. In response, Black turnout has been up across the South, and in Mississippi’s primary, nearly as many Democrats voted as Republicans.
The Republican-controlled Mississippi Legislature is threatening to redistrict away the seat of Bennie Thompson, the state’s sole Democrat and African-American House member, and Mr. Colom typically ends his stump speeches by denouncing racial gerrymandering, offering a homage to Mississippi’s central role in the civil rights movement, and pleading with his audiences to exercise the rights won through an earlier generation’s sacrifices.
“They want to carve you up in a way your where your vote is really not going to matter,” he told his Pilgrim Church audience. “They want to decide what votes matter in Mississippi.” But thanks to civil rights heroes, the right to vote itself was still alive. “They sacrificed, they died, they went to prison, the lost their jobs,” he thundered. “They did that so we could have the one power they knew we needed at this moment, the power to vote.”
Mississippi may be the prime example of a maddening problem for Democrats in the closing weeks of this campaign: They have more opportunities than resources. But the chance to revolutionize the country’s political map doesn’t come along very often. Mr. Colom’s campaign slogan is “Mississippi Matters.” In this election, it surely does.
E.J. Dionne Jr., a Times contributing Opinion writer, is the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics,” “Our Divided Political Heart,” “Why the Right Went Wrong” and, most recently, “100% Democracy,” with Miles Rapoport.
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