As his narrow lead in the Mississippi Senate race expanded on Thursday, Democrat Scott Colom told NBC News that his party had all but abandoned the state before his campaign.
“First of all, let’s not give them too much credit; they haven’t been trying,” Colom said. I’ve been in Mississippi for 15 years, most of the time the Democrats conceded the state. And my frustration with that is, 38% of the population is African American; they’re very loyal Democrats. They vote 90-95% Democrat. There’s a lot of white rural Democrats across Mississippi.”
“That’s a shame, right, because morally, how could you not compete in a state where people are denying folks health care? How could you not compete in a state where folks are, you know, getting betrayed on tariffs? Farmers are getting betrayed, consumers, small businesses. How could you not compete in a state where voting rights are being attacked left and right?” he added. “When you say, ‘Listen, I can’t win those voters’, what you’re saying is ‘I don’t care enough about those voters’. And when you show voters you don’t care, they don’t show up. So what I did is I showed up, and turns out when you show up, people start to believe.”
Colom’s Senate campaign, which benefitted from very little help from the national party, was propelled, in part, by a series of viral ads that he thanked his campaign’s content creators for producing this week, as his lead in the vote count expanded.
One ad, released in mid-October, racked up more than 20 million views across social networks. It seized on a remark by the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, who tried to dodge a question from a TV anchor about the high price of beef by saying: “You have so many proteins to choose from”.
The ad, which begins with that gaffe, then cuts to three Mississippi voters responding to the senator. “Pick another protein?” a man grilling burgers says. “Shit, I’d rather pick another senator instead.”
“Pick another protein?” a woman eating says next. “She done lost her damn mind. I’d rather pick another senator.”
“Pick another protein?” a woman in a grocery store says. “What the f-”.
According to Colom, the idea for the ad came from Patrick Gaspard, a former US ambassador to South Africa and adviser to president Barack Obama and it was directed and edited by Ryan Sayles. Sayles, Colom wrote this week, “should be considered the breakout-star of this cycle. He’s going to be a giant in the media consultant game. He did GAME CHANGING work with SO little.”
Another comedic ad, a Halloween parody of the film Sinners called Sinators, was written and directed by Colom’s twin brother, Andrew Colom, who also starred in it along with the candidate.
At the end of the campaign, Colom starred in a much more serious ad, showing the candidate at the Mississippi home where the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963 for registering Black voters.
“I’ve been a prosecutor for 10 years and unfortunately I’ve stood in a lot of houses where something terrible happened,” Colom says in the ad. “This isn’t any house. This isn’t any tragedy. This is where Medger Evers died. He fought for this country and Normandy. He came home to Mississippi and they wouldn’t let him vote. So he organized, helping other people register.”
“He was killed for helping Mississippian vote,” Colom says at the end of the ad. “On Tuesday, use your vote and honor everyone who died for that right.”
Fox Style News Syndicate. Sourced from broadcast reporting: Read Full Source Coverage.