Black turnout and anti-incumbent sentiment remain key election variables
Mississippi has the country’s highest share of Black voters, at close to 40%. It is rural, agriculture-heavy and among the poorest, so NPR said higher prices were felt harder there. But President Trump won the state by 23 points in 2024. NPR described the state as “extremely racially polarized” and said that meant not enough white voters backed Democrats for the party to win statewide. NPR wrote, “On paper, Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race seems like the perfect place for a political upset this year,” and said President Trump’s Monday rally there seemed to support that assessment.
Mississippi had been left off many people’s radars and largely out of campaign investments even as hundreds of millions of dollars went into Senate races in conservative-heavy states such as Iowa, Texas, Ohio and Alaska, with a last-minute flood of cash going to Kansas. Scott Colom, a district attorney and the Democratic Senate nominee, told NPR that was a mistake. “The reality is, Mississippi has never been a lost cause, we’ve been a betrayed cause,” he said. “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 spent almost nothing in Mississippi.”
Colom is challenging incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, who blocked his nomination to be a federal judge during the Biden administration. In the final weeks before the Nov. 3 election, both parties rushed to spend millions of dollars in Mississippi. National polling suggested a possible pathway in which Democratic enthusiasm and elevated Black turnout, combined with fewer Republican base voters and defections from the party, made deep-red races deeply competitive this cycle.
Beyond Mississippi, an NPR related report said Democrats saw an opening at the edge of the competitive midterms map in Arkansas. The report presented that as Democrats’ assessment, not an established polling result. A separate NPR report said Trump and Obama had hit the campaign trail and raised the question of whether their appearances would affect candidates. Another NPR report characterized Kansas as a newly competitive Senate race and framed it as a test of Trump’s unpopular policies.
Over the last month, the Hyde-Smith campaign strategy emphasized national Democratic investment and attention as proof Colom was too extreme for Mississippi, and the campaign spent heavily on advertisements making that case. An advertisement titled “Most Radical” said, “Meet the most radical Senate candidate in our lifetime, Scott Colom.” It continued, “Twice nominated by Biden, beholden to the far left. As DA, violent crime doubled on his watch.”
The Hyde-Smith campaign spent more than $1.3 million on that advertisement, according to AdImpact. NPR reported that Democrats spent about $5 million this month, compared with Republicans’ $3.2 million, with a message that there was no daylight between the unpopular president and down-ballot Republicans. Colom thinks voters agree. “I mean, the reality is if somebody’s doing a good job, it’s hard to beat them,” he said. “If Cindy Hyde-Smith was focused on the voters, it’d be tough. But it’s very clear the voters of Mississippi want to fire her.”
NPR said the brunt of the Democratic money and manpower headed to Mississippi was driven by a growing number of those who argued that the party’s future runs through the South, including Harris, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Colom’s Thursday closing message came at his hometown high school gym, where about a thousand people heard the candidate speak alongside Harris. Many attendees paired optimism for his campaign with a feeling of being down about those in power regardless of party affiliation, citing the war in Iran, rising fuel costs and dissatisfaction with Trump’s second term. Celestine Rice said many people were realizing the need to focus on bringing change to the political system and representation.
“Before, we didn’t realize how bad it was, but now it’s obvious,” Rice said. “The moral compass of this country is gone.” Rice said many people had taken for granted an era when the country seemed more focused on caring for its citizens and now saw that “big money, it doesn’t trickle down like they said.”
Harris said political changes in the last year and a half were the result of “the most callous, corrupt and incompetent presidential administration we have ever experienced.” “We’ve been going through that range of emotions from anger to sadness to depression, all of that for a year and a half,” she said. “Well guess what? We’re 12 days out from an election. And it’s time to turn that anger into action.”
About a hundred miles up the road a few days later, Trump, Hyde-Smith and other Mississippi Republicans gathered in Corinth on Monday to motivate the party’s base to show up and vote the next Tuesday. In a statement ahead of the rally, Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager, Jake Monssen, said, “We are confident that Mississippians will once again send Cindy Hyde-Smith to the U.S. Senate.” Monssen said Hyde-Smith and President Trump had built a strong working relationship and that she gladly accepted Trump’s offer to help rally voters and support her get-out-the-vote efforts. “With so much at stake in this election, Mississippians deserve to hear directly from their President about the consequences of electing Democrats, the radical socialist policies being pushed by Scott Colom, and the importance of this election. Team Cindy looks forward to a successful, high-energy event in Corinth,” he said.
Speaking ahead of the president, Hyde-Smith touted accomplishments from her time in office and said the choice facing voters “could not be clearer.” “We know what we’re looking at: this is socialism versus capitalism, and we know that,” she said. “Communism versus democracy, and big government versus the free market. It could not be higher stakes.” Hyde-Smith repeatedly reiterated the importance of Republicans voting and said, “Endorsements don’t win elections, votes win elections.” For his part, Trump said his visit to Mississippi was because Hyde-Smith was in good shape in her matchup. “Sometimes when you think somebody’s doing so well, nobody votes,” Trump said. “‘Oh, Cindy’s great, she’s gonna do no problem, let’s stay home.’ And then bad things happen, Cindy. That’s why I’m here, just get out and vote.”
Because the Senate contest is statewide, it cannot be gerrymandered. In national context, a separate NPR related report said Republicans were spending millions but might still fail to win districts drawn to favor them. That assessment concerned districts drawn to favor Republicans and did not describe Mississippi’s statewide Senate contest.
Even in an environment favorable to Democrats, NPR said history and mathematics remained a challenge. The last Democratic senator from Mississippi came in the early 80s, and the last successful Black statewide candidate served during Reconstruction. Even during the 2018 blue wave, Hyde-Smith won the special election for this seat by roughly 7 points.
Other factors both campaigns are awaiting on Nov. 3 include a pervasive anti-incumbent streak that has shown up in polls and primaries this election cycle, coupled with a significant increase in Black voter turnout in states with early voting. Ashley Kennedy Shelton, who runs a nonpartisan civic engagement group in Louisiana, told NPR earlier this month that people of all stripes had expressed frustration and a desire for change. “I think you’re going to see voters truly show up, because folks are just tired,” she said. “They’re like: ‘This doesn’t work, and it hasn’t been working for quite some time.’ I think you’re going to see it at the ballot box.”
The race carries weight beyond Mississippi, or even control of the Senate, NPR said, and has become a stand-in for conversations about the power of Black voters in the South. NPR reported that many Southern Republican-led states rushed to redraw congressional maps that remove opportunities for Black voters to elect candidates of their choice after a Supreme Court ruling earlier in the year rolled back part of the Voting Rights Act. In Mississippi, Republicans have signaled a desire to redraw state legislative and judicial maps after the midterms, and Colom said the push could extend further into local elections. “What that tells us is you’re trying to take away power from the voters and give it to the leaders,” Colom said. “That’s not how democracy is supposed to work. The voters have to pick the leaders, not the leaders pick the voters.”