Democratic US Senate candidate Scott Colom greets supporters while awaiting results during his midterm election watch party at the Ice House in Jackson, Mississippi, November 3, 2026
Fresh off Scott Colom’s historic 2026 midterm election victory, which made him the first Black U.S. Senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) is calling out Democratic leaders he says did not support Colom’s efforts. In an interview with Vox’s Today, Explained, Thompson reflects on what contributed to Colom’s win while also sounding the alarm about the struggle it took to get there without help from those in power.
Thompson has represented Mississippi’s majority-Black Second Congressional District since 1993. He first began working with Colom early in Colom’s political career. Thompson and his peers formed the Mississippi Black Leadership Institute as a way to get others involved in enacting change. It was through the institute that he met Colom. “And he [Colom] really said, ‘I want to run for something. I don’t know what it is.’ He said, ‘But there’s a district attorney’s position that’s available. It’s three counties,’” Thompson explained.
From there, they got to work.
“We helped Scott put his campaign together. We hooked him up with various people, and he beat a 28-year incumbent as district attorney,” Thompson said.
Despite Southern politics that include socioeconomic struggles that impact Black residents and historical racial divides in Mississippi, Thompson says Colom stood out as a candidate, even though the district he ran in did not have a majority-Black population. “He had the fire in the belly. And he never met a stranger. And so we prepared him, and he’s one of our star pupils of that class,” Thompson said of Colom.
But they faced issues because of a lack of support from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), which is the official campaign arm of the Democratic Party dedicated solely to electing and re-electing Democrats to the United States Senate. While Thompson does not know why the DSCC pushed back, he says he believes that “Northeasterners were still looking down on Southerners.”
Without their support, they campaigned even harder, relying on messaging more than anything.
“We did everything that the system says you should do. We gave the demographics. That district [Colom] represented was not a majority-African American district. He beat that sitting district attorney in a majority-white district because he had a plan and he had a message. We had a rich message, but a poor campaign. Because we couldn’t get our DSCC to help,” Thompson said. Thompson is now able to say, ‘I told you so,’ to the DSCC regarding Colom.
