Issen

TUPELO, Mississippi — The Friday before the election, I flew to Memphis and then drove to Tupelo, Mississippi, for an end-of-campaign rally. Bill Clinton, James Carville and Mitch Landrieu were all headed there in a show of neighboring state solidarity on behalf of Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom. There were a handful of local reporters perched in the balcony of an old church sanctuary turned event space, but I was the only person present from the national press corps. Everyone there was acutely aware of how hard it would be to topple a Republican senator and elect a Black man in Mississippi. This was, yes, the state with the highest percentage of Black voters in the country. But it’s also a state with profound racial polarization in its voting patterns — whites mostly vote for Republicans and Blacks for Democrats. There hadn’t been a Black senator here since Reconstruction. And Mississippi had not elected a Democratic senator since 1982, when an 81-year-old John Stennis defeated 34-year-old upstart Haley Barbour. Until now. Colom’s upset win, which was called just over a week after the election, marks perhaps the most unimaginable victory in a midterm that exceeded even the most optimistic Democratic expectations. Colom, however, may have been the least surprised. After Clinton and his Louisiana posse along with the rest of what had been a full house left that Friday night, I sat down with the 43-year-old local prosecutor in the old church pews. We spoke about convincing people to believe in his candidacy, why it’s so vital for Democrats to compete in the South and how he, much like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, was relying on the attention economy to win. Oh, and we briefly stopped our interview when his two young daughters came over to tease their dad, pretending not to know if he was “daddy or uncle” because Colom’s identical twin brother looks even more like him after a recent hair cut. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity: