The South Pollster

There was a joke going around the internet that the reason it was taking so long to get the final election numbers from Mississippi is because they have to count, One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi. Whatever took so long, it was worth the wait. Scott Colom’s “shocking upset victory in a state where Donald Trump won by 23 points in 2024 is even more remarkable considering Mississippi’s history. This was the state where Jim Crow was the most violent and repressive. It was where Emmett Till was lynched, Evers was assassinated, and the young civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. There were 581 documented lynchings during the Jim Crow era, more than any other state.” Mississippi Elects Its First Black Senator Since Reconstruction. “Before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, only 6.7 percent of eligible Black voters were registered to vote in Mississippi. Now, more than 60 years later, it was Black voters who turned out in record numbers to rewrite the history books, motivated in part by a new struggle to protect voting rights.”

+ “It was Mr. Hudson’s father who was initially cast in the campaign ad mocking a suggestion from Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican incumbent, that Mississippi residents pick another type of protein to avoid rising beef prices. When the elder Mr. Hudson balked at a script that would require him to utter profanity on camera, his son volunteered.” The Man at the Center of Scott Colom’s Protein Ad. (And shee-it, that ad helped change history.)