Mark Melo

President Donald Trump went to Corinth, Mississippi, to tell people why they should not vote for @scott_colom as their Senator. By the time Trump took the stage, some of those people had already met him. Colom, a Democrat running against incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, had come in a sweatshirt and walked down the line outside the arena, shaking hands and asking people what they were worried about. One man, a veteran, brought up gun rights. Others talked about gas prices and the war in Iran. I saw a man ask for a selfie. A few days earlier, Colom had gone on CNN and said he thought Trump had done a good job securing the border. He also said he supported the Second Amendment. He talked about it as a father who wanted his wife, Nadia, to be able to protect their two daughters. On tariffs and the war in Iran, he was just as plain about where he disagreed. He argued that the tariffs were hurting Mississippi farmers and small businesses, and that the war was driving up the cost of diesel for the people who grow the food and the people who haul it. If you want to understand why Colom was comfortable in that line, it helps to know who raised him. His father, Wilbur, was a lawyer who worked for Ronald Reagan and once ran for state treasurer as a Republican. His mother, Dorothy, was the first Black person elected to her region’s chancery court. Scott grew up in Columbus, became a judge himself and, in 2015, became the first Black district attorney elected to represent a majority-white district in Mississippi. When Joe Biden nominated him to be a federal judge, Hyde-Smith blocked the nomination. Colom eventually ran for her seat. And then there were the ads that arguably tilted the race. When Hyde-Smith answered a question about expensive beef by pointing out that people had other proteins to choose from, Colom’s campaign took the joke to the grocery store. For Halloween, his twin brother, Andrew, wrote and directed a spoof of Sinners, the Ryan Coogler film set in Mississippi. The brothers played the twins themselves. Alexis York, a 29-year-old in Jackson, told The Washington Post she recognized someone in one of Colom’s videos. He used to buy lunch from her at the gas station. That mattered to her and as it turned out, this year was the first time she voted. Isitoshe, For his last ad of the campaign season, Colom went to the house in Jackson where Medgar Evers was shot in his driveway in 1963. Evers had spent years organizing for civil rights and helping Black Mississippians register to vote. Colom said he wanted people to hear what it had cost Evers and his family for others to be able to cast a ballot. In that last ad, he never asked anybody to vote for him. Once all the votes are counted, Colom will probably be announced the next Mississippi senator. He will become the state’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. May the day break