Democrats Pour $5M Into Mississippi Senate Race, GOP Spends $3.2M

Mississippi voters will decide a Senate race on Nov. 3 that has drawn late spending from both parties, with Democrats putting about $5 million into the contest this month against $3.2 million from Republicans, according to advertising data cited in the source. Democrat Scott Colom, the district attorney for the 16th Circuit Court District, is challenging incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Colom has argued that national Democrats ignored Mississippi for too long. "The reality is, Mississippi has never been a lost cause, we've been a betrayed cause," Colom told NPR. "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."

Mississippi has the highest share of Black voters in the country, close to 40%, and is a poor, agriculture-heavy state where higher prices land harder. President Trump won the state by 23 points in 2024, and the state remains heavily racially polarized, with too few white voters backing Democrats for the party to prevail statewide. The last Democrat elected to the Senate from Mississippi came in the early 1980s, and the last successful Black statewide candidate dated to Reconstruction.

Colom held a rally Thursday in a Columbus high school gym with about 1,000 people in attendance, joined by former Vice President Kamala Harris. Attendees cited the war in Iran, rising fuel costs and dissatisfaction with Trump's second term. Celestine Rice, who attended, said: "Before, we didn't realize how bad it was, but now it's obvious. The moral compass of this country is gone."

About 100 miles north in Corinth, Trump appeared alongside Hyde-Smith to rally Republican turnout. Hyde-Smith's campaign manager, Jake Monssen, said in a statement: "We are confident that Mississippians will once again send Cindy Hyde-Smith to the U.S. Senate." Hyde-Smith framed the choice as "socialism versus capitalism" and said: "Endorsements don't win elections, votes win elections." Trump said he traveled to the state because he wanted to make sure supporters turned out: "Sometimes when you think somebody's doing so well, nobody votes."

Hyde-Smith's campaign has spent more than $1.3 million on an ad titled "Most Radical," which says of Colom: "Twice nominated by Biden, beholden to the far left. As DA, violent crime doubled on his watch." AdImpact provided the spending figure. Colom responded: "I mean, the reality is if somebody's doing a good job, it's hard to beat them. 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."

Hyde-Smith blocked Colom's nomination to a federal judge seat during the Biden administration. Republicans in Mississippi have signaled a desire to redraw state legislative and judicial districts after the midterms, following a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that rolled back part of the Voting Rights Act. Hyde-Smith won a special election for this seat by roughly 7 points in 2018. Ashley Kennedy Shelton, who runs a nonpartisan civic engagement group in Louisiana, said: "I think you're going to see voters truly show up, because folks are just tired."