JACKSON, Miss. — Scott Colom is a gregarious prosecutor who grew up in Mississippi with a Republican father who campaigned for Ronald Reagan and counted political titan Thad Cochran as a friend.

That background sounds ideal for a U.S. Senate hopeful in a Deep South state run for generations by white conservatives.

Except Colom is a Democrat. And a Black man.

So, he’s an underdog in his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a white Donald Trump acolyte seeking her second full term. Yet several variables — Colom’s biography, Mississippi’s demographics, lingering inflation and Hyde-Smith’s understated profile — make for a wildcard matchup as Republicans defend their 53-47 Senate majority at the midpoint of Trump’s second presidency.

“Mississippi matters,” Colom insisted throughout a recent day of campaigning.

He told The Associated Press he has a rare opportunity to flip the state’s usual script by casting Hyde-Smith as a rubber stamp while deflecting broadsides that he’s a liberal misfit.

“I’m going to fight the corruption that we’re seeing in D.C. that’s making everything less affordable,” he said, zeroing in on Trump’s tariffs, the Iran war and the Republican-controlled Congress’ capitulation on both. “Our junior senator has totally given away our voice. She’s not worried about us at all.”

Through aides, Hyde-Smith declined an interview. But her campaign manager projected confidence.

“No one believes in Scott Colom except for Scott Colom,” said Jake Monssen, tagging the challenger as a stooge of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and billionaire donor George Soros, whose family backed Colom’s district attorney races.

Schumer recently held a fundraiser for Colom, and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, Maryland’s first Black senator, traveled to Mississippi to support him as Democrats look for every path to Senate control. She predicted more senators will follow.

“I can guarantee you one thing,” Alsobrooks said, “I’m not the last.”

As they campaigned together, Colom cited a famous biblical long shot while alluding to his state’s history at the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement.

“We know a little something about David and Goliath in Mississippi,” he said.

The outcome hinges on ‘simple math’

Mississippi’s fraught history with racism is never far below the surface.

Colom’s weekend featured a voting rights discussion at Jackson’s Farish Street Baptist Church, where Medgar Evers, the NAACP leader killed by white supremacists in 1963, held organizing meetings. One of Evers’ successors embraced Colom’s candidacy as the next step in a long struggle.

“Mississippi is not just a moral argument,” said state NAACP Executive Director Charles Taylor. “It is simple math.”

Black voters make up a larger share of Mississippi’s 2.95 million residents (about 37%) and typical November electorate (about a third) than in any other state. More than 9 out of 10 of them typically vote Democratic but turn out at a lower rate than white voters, especially young generations, according to strategists in both major political parties. White voters opt by a 4-1 ratio or more for Republicans. Younger white voters trend slightly less Republican, but they’re also less likely to vote.

That makes most Mississippi elections closer than in neighboring Alabama and Louisiana. In 2018, Hyde-Smith won a special election runoff over Mike Espy, Mississippi’s first Black congressman since Reconstruction and a former U.S. agriculture secretary, by 7 percentage points. She notched a 10-percentage-point rematch win in 2020 but trailed Trump’s 16-percentage-point margin over Democrat Joe Biden.

Three years later, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves managed just a 3-percentage-point reelection margin and finished less than 1 percentage point over the majority threshold that Mississippi law requires to avoid a runoff in statewide general elections.

Taylor said registration and turnout efforts by the NACCP and other groups could draw 75,000 more Black voters, enough to close recent gaps.

Wilbur Colom, who once lost a state treasurer’s race as a Republican, enjoys gaming out turnout scenarios for his son.

Scott Colom can hit a winning sweet spot, his father said, by increasing Black share of the electorate to 35% and get closer to one out of four white votes rather than the typical 20% or less.

“That’s hard,” Wilbur Colom said. “But demographics are our friend here.”

Scott Colom leans on contrasting records

Colom mostly sidesteps Mississippi history or electoral math unless asked.

“We’ve made a lot more progress than we get credit for,” he said.

“A lot of Mississippians,” he added, “want somebody that’s going to look out for them,” regardless of race.

On Republican gerrymandering after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a last key Voting Rights Act provision protecting minority voting strength, Colom steers the conversation to economics. Republicans, Colom said, “don’t want to be held accountable” for how things are going.

Asked about Biden tapping him for a federal judgeship only for Hyde-Smith to block the nomination, Colom says the campaign isn’t about that. He avoids personal shots at Trump, instead emphasizing Mississippi farmers harmed by the Republican president’s tariffs and “400,000 Mississippians that don’t have health insurance” because the state hasn’t expanded Medicaid and Republicans, Hyde-Smith included, let expanded insurance premium subsidies expire.

Colom mentions crime victims and their families in his jurisdiction, promising voters will see them vouch for him. And he criticizes Hyde-Smith for using campaign funds at Las Vegas hotels.

“Voters in Mississippi were promised America first. They were promised lower grocery prices, no more endless wars, concepts of a healthcare plan,” he said. “We’ve been betrayed on all three fronts, and Cindy Hyde-Smith won’t even do a town hall to justify any of it.”

Hyde-Smith’s team targets Colom as too liberal

The senator’s aides note that she travels regularly to community events around Mississippi — and only annually to Las Vegas for a national campaign fundraiser the onetime state agriculture commissioner plans around a professional rodeo event.

Hyde-Smith, in turn, frames Colom as beholden to extremes beyond Mississippi. Monssen said voters will see a challenger trying “to transition kids’ genders,” raise taxes and give “healthcare to illegal immigrants” to please his “socialist supporters” from the coasts.

It’s a play-it-safe strategy that presumes Republicans like Steve Rogers, a 73-year-old from Brandon, still make up Mississippi’s majority.

“I like how she votes, and I think any Democrat’s wasting their time,” Rogers said. He still gives Trump high marks and hasn’t even heard of Colom. Trump’s slide “may give her some trouble,” he allows, “but I think she coasts.”

Colom acknowledged financial support from the Soros family but said no candidate controls outside political action committees. He pointed to his prosecution of a Democratic sheriff for sexual abuse of a prisoner as proof that partisanship doesn’t guide him. Voters, including many who’ve backed Trump and Hyde-Smith, “are smart enough,” he said, to “see through the lies.”

Democrat Judy Weiner, a 72-year-old poll worker in Hinds County, added that Hyde-Smith distinguishes herself only by her fealty to Trump, while not establishing a reputation for securing appropriations and helping rank-and-file Mississippians, as did her predecessor Cochran.

“He made his decisions based on what was good for all the people in Mississippi, not because the president whispered in his ear,” she said, noting Cochran attracted votes from Black and white Democrats.

A little cash could go a long way

The candidates’ campaign accounts and Mississippi’s inexpensive media markets intensify the unknowns.

Through June, Hyde-Smith had raised $3.8 million this cycle, with $2.5 million left. Colom pulled in $2.8 million and had $850,000 remaining. But Colom outpaced Hyde-Smith among individual contributors, $1.9 million to $1.8 million, from the start of 2025. More of his money ($536,000) came from Mississippi than any other state, despite Monssen’s broadsides.

There is no statewide TV advertising yet, but Senate Majority PAC spokeswoman Lauren French said the group is “watching closely.” And it doesn’t take seven figures per ad buy to penetrate the electorate, unlike in more populous states like Texas, Georgia and North Carolina. That means that either national party or super PACs could make late investments that matter.

“We need to be working for every single seat,” said Alsobrooks, the Maryland visitor, “and you know what, it always seems impossible until it’s done.”

The woman whose body was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant Jackson, Mississippi, home is 29-year-old Tasia Fortune, the Hinds County Coroner’s Office said on Thursday. Authorities have not said whether or not they suspect foul play.

The Jackson Police Department first announced in a statement on Monday evening that officers “located the body of an unidentified Black female” at the 500 block of Road of Remembrance at 9:05 p.m.

Hinds County Coroner Jeremiah Howard, who publicly identified the body as Tasia Fortune on Thursday, said earlier this week that the body would be transported to the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office to perform an autopsy to determine the cause and manner of death.

Fortune’s aunt, Etta Avolio, started a GoFundMe to help raise funds to cover burial expenses and final arrangements. The GoFundMe, which has a $3,000 goal, has raised $160 so far.

“Tasia Fortune was a beloved daughter, sister, and friend whose passing has left her family devastated and heartbroken,” Avolio’s fundraiser says. “During this lifetime, families go through ups and downs, and right now Tasia’s loved ones are facing one of the hardest moments they have ever known. Tasia was a strong-minded, big-hearted, vibrant young woman whose life was taken at just twenty-nine years old. Her loss has deeply shaken everyone who knew and loved her, and her family is now trying to begin healing while also facing the painful responsibility of saying their final farewells.”

“The family also wants others to know that justice will be served, and they hold firmly to their faith, believing that God is on their side as they walk through this heartbreaking loss,” Fortune’s aunt adds.

Ward 3 Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes sent a letter to U.S. Attorney Baxter Kruger’s office on Wednesday asking for assistance, WLBT reported.

Mississippi authorities have investigated other high-profile cases involving tree-hanging deaths in the past year.

In September 2025, a group of student athletes found 18-year-old Delta State University student Trey Reed, who was Black, hanging from a tree on the campus in Cleveland, Mississippi. His death raised fears of a racially motivated murder, considering the history of hundreds of lynchings of Black men that occurred in Mississippi in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Ben Crump, the attorney who represented Reed’s family, cast doubt on the official ruling that Reed’s death was a suicide and helped obtain an independent autopsy. Last week, the Mississippi Free Press reported for the first time that Reed’s family said his girlfriend had received text messages from his phone the night before his body was found in which he threatened to hang himself. The family still has questions, though. They said they are waiting on the final independent autopsy results, but have not been able to reach Crump since January.

On the same day that Trey Reed was found last year, police in Vicksburg, Mississippi, found the body of Cory Zukatis hanging in a tree. Misinformation spread connecting that case to Reed’s, with some falsely claiming that Zukatis, a homeless white man whose dog had recently been taken from him, was also Black. Authorities later ruled his death a suicide, too.

Follow the Mississippi Free Press’ coverage of Tasia Fortune and read past stories here.

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