How Scott Colom defied Democratic doubters to make Mississippi a battleground

Raphael Warnock wasn’t trying to make the crowd laugh. “There’s one race I think we’re sleeping on, and that’s Mississippi,” the Georgia senator said as he talked up Democrats’ big plans for the year at a Washington, DC, fundraiser in April. Warnock had been beating the drum for the Senate race in the deep-red state going back to last November, eagerly pointing out to anyone who’d listen that the percentage of Black voters in Mississippi was higher than in Georgia, which itself had defied history to elect him twice. But the attendees did laugh, according to a recording obtained by CNN, and quite hard, until Warnock cut them off. “Mississippi — yes,” he said, before launching into a little of Scott Colom’s biography: a seventh-generation Mississippian who beat a long-time incumbent district attorney in Trump territory.