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President Trump kicks off his final week of campaign travel before the midterms today in Mississippi. The deeply conservative state has a U.S. Senate race that has seen millions of dollars in last-minute spending, as NPR's Stephen Fowler explains.
STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: On paper, Mississippi seems like the perfect place for an upset in this midterm environment. It has the highest share of Black voters in the country. It's rural, agriculture heavy and one of the poorest states, so higher prices are felt harder. But President Trump won the state by 23 points in 2024, and it's extremely racially polarized.
SCOTT COLOM: The reality is Mississippi's never been a lost cause. We've been a betrayed cause. The Democratic Party has not been trying to win Mississippi. Let's stop kidding ourselves, right? They spent hundreds of millions of dollars in other states. They've spent almost nothing in Mississippi.
FOWLER: That's Scott Colom, the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee. He's a district attorney and challenging incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, who blocked his nomination to be a federal judge during the Biden administration. In recent weeks, Democrats and Republicans have spent millions of dollars in Mississippi as polling shows a pathway where Democratic enthusiasm, elevated Black turnout and fewer Republican base voters makes deep red races deeply competitive this cycle, and the general vibe of voters feeling down about those in power, regardless of party.
CELESTINE RICE: Before, we didn't realize how bad it was, but now it's obvious. So, yeah.
FOWLER: What's bad?
RICE: Everything, everything - the moral compass of this country is gone.
FOWLER: At a rally Thursday night in Columbus for Colom, Celestine Rice took a break from dancing to the pre-speech music to share her thoughts.
RICE: Now is the time, I think, that people are starting to realize that. They're starting to realize that, hey, big money - it doesn't trickle down like they said.
FOWLER: The Democratic money and manpower is driven by a growing number of those who argue the party's future runs through places like Mississippi. That includes former Vice President Kamala Harris, who headlined that rally, along with figures like Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock and former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg. The Republican reaction has highlighted the investment and attention from national Democrats as proof Colom is too extreme for Mississippi and have spent heavily on ads saying as much like this one from Hyde-Smith.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: The most radical Senate candidate in our lifetime - Scott Colom, twice nominated by Biden, beholden to the far left. As DA...
FOWLER: But Democrats have spent even more in recent weeks with a message that there's no daylight between the unpopular president and downballot Republicans. Colom thinks voters agree.
COLOM: Yeah, I mean, the reality is if somebody's doing a good job, it's hard to beat them, right? I mean, if Cindy Hyde-Smith was focused on the voters, you know, it'd be tough.
FOWLER: The race carries weight beyond Mississippi or even control of the Senate. It's become a stand-in for conversations about the power of Black voters in the South. Many Southern Republican-led states have rushed to redraw congressional maps that remove opportunities for Black voters after a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year. In Mississippi, Colom, who is Black, said it could go further.
COLOM: It could go to school boards, go to judicial elections. I mean, we elect a lot of positions in Mississippi. And so what that tells us is you're trying to, you know, take away power from the voters and give it to the leaders. That's not how democracy is supposed to work. The voters have to pick the leaders, not the leaders pick their voters.
FOWLER: In the statewide race that can't be gerrymandered and in an environment favorable to Democrats, history and math still prove to be a challenge. The last Democratic senator from Mississippi came in the early '80s. The last successful Black statewide candidate was during Reconstruction. In the 2018 blue wave, Cindy Hyde-Smith won a special election for the seat by roughly seven points. Still...
ASHLEY KENNEDY SHELTON: I think that you are going to see voters truly show up because folks are just tired. Like, this doesn't work, and it hasn't been working for quite some time. And I think you're going to see it at the ballot box.
FOWLER: Ashley Kennedy Shelton runs a nonpartisan civic engagement group in Louisiana and said she's hearing from people of all stripes who say things are bad, and it's time for a change. That feeling, plus a notable surge in Black voter turnout in the primaries and in early voting so far, is one reason why President Trump is holding a rally in the northeast corner of Mississippi in the final week of the election. Stephen Fowler, NPR News, Columbus, Mississippi.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUDDY WATERS SONG, "THE SAME THING") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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