Mississippi's Decade-Long Organizing Infrastructure Finally Paid Off in Colom's Senate Upset

A loose coalition of ~12 mostly Black-led nonprofits converted years of voter registration, crisis response, and community education into nearly 1 million midterm voters — presidential-year numbers in a state that hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate since the 1980s.

Scott Colom's upset victory in Mississippi's midterm Senate race didn't materialize from a single catalyzing event. It was the product of at least a decade of infrastructure-building by a coalition of roughly a dozen, mostly Black-led nonprofits — organizations that had been registering voters, running hotlines, fighting redistricting, and responding to crises long before national media noticed Mississippi.

The Supreme Court's April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, became an accelerant rather than a starting point. The ruling triggered a "Mississippi Fights Back" rally that drew thousands on May 20, but the coalition already knew its division of labor: who was registering voters in which counties, who was canvassing, who was handling legal strategy. Rukia Lumumba of the People's Advocacy Institute described a machine that was already running when Callais gave it higher RPMs. The redistricting fight doubled as a civic education campaign about voting itself. MS Votes, founded in 2016, had been doing the unsexy groundwork for years — voter registration drives on college campuses, in rural communities, and inside prisons and jails where people without felony disenfranchisement could vote absentee. The 2020 George Floyd protests expanded the organization's footprint from Jackson to Hattiesburg, the Gulf Coast, and the Delta. That same year, MS Votes helped organize one of the largest protests in state history, which contributed to the removal of the Confederate battle emblem from Mississippi's state flag. By 2023, a voter information hotline was operational in partnership with the Mississippi Center for Justice, the ACLU of Mississippi, and the state's Southern Poverty Law Center. The coalition's members had overlapping histories that predated any single campaign. Various organizations had partnered to resist the state's attempted takeover of Jackson's majority-Black public school district, to provide mutual aid during the 2021 winter storm that worsened Jackson's ongoing water crises, and to fight for the closure of Parchman Penitentiary. PAI held Mississippi's first participatory budgeting process in 2019. These weren't electoral activities — they were the trust-building and capacity-building that made electoral coordination possible. After Trump's second inauguration, a separate, interracial group calling themselves the "Do Somethings" formed around the conviction that inaction wasn't an option. Kathleen O'Beirne organized this into MS United, which worked independently and alongside the existing coalition to reach voters who typically supported Republicans. Their method was personal: handwritten messages mailed or texted, with encouragement to pass the message along. O'Beirne framed the outreach explicitly in terms of cross-racial economic interest, citing Lyndon Johnson's observation about racial division as a tool for economic extraction. Colom needed both a surge in Black turnout and roughly a quarter of white voters. Mississippi delivered almost 1 million midterm voters — numbers that rival presidential election turnout in a state where extreme voting restrictions have kept participation below the national average for two decades. The coalition's voter registration, education, and mobilization work across multiple cycles created the conditions. The interracial outreach from MS United expanded the map. Organizers explicitly place themselves in the lineage of Fannie Lou Hamer, who addressed Congress in 1964 and helped form the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and of Hollis Watkins, Chokwe Lumumba, and Frankye "Malika" Adams-Johnson. The framework they articulate isn't just electoral — it's about co-governance and self-determination. As Lumumba put it: "We're not just looking to cast a ballot. We're looking to be active participants in the governing of our cities." Whether that vision survives contact with the institutional power structures Colom now enters is the next chapter.