Purple Mississippi? Overcoming GOP Voter Suppression, Black Voters Power Dem Wins Across the South

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Mississippi's race for the U.S. Senate remains too close to call: Democrat Scott Colom is narrowly leading Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by nearly 2,000 votes with 96% of votes counted as of Friday morning. Donald Trump carried Mississippi by 23 points in 2024. If elected, Colom would be the first Democrat to win the state in 40 years and the first African American since 1875, during the Reconstruction era. Colom, the former district attorney for northeast Mississippi, made the issue of affordability central to his campaign. He has sharply criticized national Democrats for writing off Mississippi and failing to invest in his campaign early on.

"The entire country shifted left. But when you look at it regionally, the biggest shifts took place in the South — Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana," says Cliff Albright, executive director of Black Voters Matter. That "wave of energy" was "largely led by Black voters who were most under attack with the mid-decade racial gerrymandering that was taking place. It clearly backfired, and all it did was to wake up a sleeping giant."

"Without the extreme gerrymandering, without the extreme voter restrictions that have been seen throughout the South, [the] wave would have been even bigger," adds Chris Kromm, executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies. "There's a real opportunity for engaging more voters and really pushing the region in a more progressive direction."

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