Scott Colom: ‘The Callais decision helped me’

Scott Colom is the newest Democratic senator-elect from Mississippi. He broke Mississippi’s red wall after more than four decades of Republican control, in part attributing his victory to a massive mobilization response following the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

Colom said he knew Callais would have a swift and profound impact nearly two weeks before his historic win, in an interview with Politico’s Jonathan Martin. Mississippi, the state with the highest share of Black voters in the nation, saw record turnout compared with recent midterms.

“I mean, the Callais decision helped me, right? We’ve got African American voters understanding that voting rights are on the line,” Colom told Martin.

After Louisiana v. Callais, Mississippi was one of the first states to jump at redistricting maps. Republican legislators sought to draw maps that would carve out Rep. Bennie Thompson’s (D) seat, the state’s only Black congressman representing a heavily Black district.

It didn’t take memorizing Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion to mobilize people. Voters witnessed the attempted ousting of their duly elected representatives firsthand, Colom described.

“Even if they don’t understand the case, they understand that you’re trying to get rid of Bennie Thompson,” Colom said. “And they understand that you want to pick the person that represented us — and nobody ever likes that.”

“People were like: ‘Why you got to draw the lines up to say that we don’t get to pick our person,’” Colom added.

Mississippi chapters of the NAACP, ACLU and other state and local organizations spent months organizing to get voters to the polls in an effort akin to civil rights organizing of the 1960s. 

“I want America to think about this moment like the moment in which the Civil Rights movement was at its peak,” ACLU Mississippi’s Policy Director Lydia Grizzell told Democracy Docket last week.

Colom smashed more than a century of precedent Wednesday when tallied results put him over the edge to become the state’s first Black U.S. Senator since the Reconstruction era.

Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center, said the continued redistricting backlash could maintain momentum even before Colom takes office. In a social media post Monday, Li outlined one potential outcome for reconsidering the redistricting that rallied voters to Democratic victories.