Democrat Scott Colom is promising a “Mississippi first” approach to everything from health care to taxes if voters elect him to the U.S. Senate. The Lowndes County district attorney announced his plans to challenge incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith for her seat in 2026, two years after she blocked his nomination to a federal court.
He says he won’t look at policy through a Republican, Democratic or bipartisan lens.
“I will look at it through a Mississippi lens,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug. 29. “That’s how I’ve been as a district attorney. You know, when I got elected in 2015, I was running against a 27-year incumbent. A lot of people didn’t think I could win. But I trusted Mississippi voters because I’m a seventh-generation Mississippian.”
Former President Joe Biden nominated Colom to serve as a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi on Oct. 14, 2022. Hyde-Smith later blocked the Senate from even considering his nomination in 2023 by refusing to return a “blue slip” to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Senators can block judicial nominees from their home states if they do not submit the slip. Her colleague, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, supported Colom’s nomination.
“There are quite a lot of mainstream Mississippi Republicans who tell me they think he’s been a strong law-and-order prosecutor,” Wicker told the Daily Journal in 2023.
Hyde-Smith announced her reelection campaign on Aug. 29.
“I’m proud to officially launch my campaign for re-election to the United States Senate! It’s been the honor of a lifetime to serve Mississippi,” she tweeted. “I will continue working every day to defend our values, strengthen our economy, and stand up for the people of our great state.”
Hyde-Smith Cited Colom’s Previous Support for Trans Rights
As she explained her decision to block Scott Colom’s nomination to the federal judiciary in 2023, Sen. Hyde-Smith said that she disapproved of Colom’s support for transgender rights and the support he garnered from a PAC that billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros funded in 2015.
“I visited with the district attorney recently, and I recognize that he is smart and well liked in his district,” the Republican senator said in a statement in April 2023. “However, there are a number of concerns I have regarding his record. As someone with a strong interest in protecting the rights of girls and women, I am concerned about Scott Colom’s opposition to legislation to protect female athletes.”
In 2021, Mississippi enacted a law banning transgender student athletes from participating on teams that match their gender identity. Colom had not directly addressed that issue, but did sign a letter in 2021 opposing “ongoing efforts to criminalize transgender people and gender-affirming healthcare across the country,” including efforts to “criminalize parents who allow their children to receive medically recommended treatments.” The letter did not mention sports.
Colom told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug. 25, 2025, that Hyde-Smith’s decision to block his nomination “was a frustrating thing to go through,” but as a Christian, he forgives her for her decision. As the coach of his daughters’ girls’ soccer team, Colom said he does not support “biological boys … playing girls’ sports.”
“I never believed that. But I will tell you, as a Mississippian walking around and talking to voters, talking to citizens, I talk to a lot of people, unlike our current senator, who hasn’t had a town hall since she’s been senator. I’ve talked to a lot of people, and they’ve never brought this up to me, Heather. Never, not one time,” he told this reporter on Aug. 29.
“What they talk to me about is the rise in grocery costs, the fact that the minimum wage is ridiculous, that they haven’t gotten a raise since the Afghanistan war, and they’re very, very worried about the health care and they’re worried about the hospitals,” Colom continued. “So as the senator, I’m going to focus on the solutions that they’re concerned about.”
Though Mississippi was the state that sent the first two Black U.S. senators to the U.S. Capitol, the Magnolia State has not elected a Black candidate to the U.S. Senate or any statewide office since the late 1800s.
In 2018 and 2020, Mike Espy, a Black Democrat, ran against Hyde-Smith in two of the most competitive U.S. Senate races Mississippi had seen in years. The incumbent Republican’s remarks about attending a “public hanging” stirred national controversy and her past as a student at a segregation academy in the 1970s sparked a national conversation.
Colom Proposes ‘Mississippi First’ Attitude
Scott Colom is a seventh-generation Mississippian who was born and raised in Columbus, where he became the city’s first Black prosecutor and still resides today. Voters elected him to serve as district attorney of the 16th Circuit Court District in 2015 when he unseated the 30-year incumbent, Forrest Allgood—a prosecutor known for using flawed forensic evidence to secure multiple wrongful convictions that were later overturned. Colom, the who is the first Black district attorney elected to the 16th Circuit Court District, won reelection to the position in 2019 and 2023.
Colom said one of the many reasons why he was running for U.S. Senate is due to his frustration with Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s voting record, particularly mentioning how she voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that helped address the Jackson water crisis—legislation that her Mississippi Republican colleague, Sen. Wicker, supported.
Colom said that if elected, he will bring a “Mississippi first” attitude to the U.S. Senate. He said he wants to emulate Mississippi leaders like Democratic U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson and Republican former U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran. He particularly pointed to Thompson’s votes to improve health care and bring broadband access to rural Mississippi,
“At the end of the day, you’ve got to put Mississippi above D.C. politics,” Colom said. “… You can trust Senator Wicker to do that. You cannot trust Senator Hyde-Smith to do that. She is going to do whatever Mitch McConnell, you know, Ted Cruz, (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) thinks. She cares more about what they think than what we think.”
Federal Tax Exemptions for Teachers, Law Enforcement Officers
Scott Colom said that he thinks the top two ways to prevent and fight crime are to provide jobs and educational opportunities for Mississippians, which is why he is proposing exempting public school teachers and law enforcement officers from paying income taxes.
He said he wants to improve teachers’ resources so they can properly train and educate the future workforce—a move that he says would help prevent the “brain drain” that drives many educated Mississippians out of the state for better educational and occupational opportunities elsewhere.
“Teachers have the responsibility of our future. Police have a responsibility (not only) to keep our communities safe, but our system fair. And so when you have that much responsibility and that much accountability, you need to make sure that you have the pay that makes you thrive and not just survive.”
Colom supports raising the minimum wage, which has not increased since Congress set it at $7.25 an hour in 2009. Minimum wage in Mississippi is based on the federal minimum wage law.
“It’s time for Mississippi workers to get a raise. And if you raise the minimum wage, what that does is that boosts everybody’s wages because if you move up the floor, you move up everybody’s wages,” he said. “And Mississippi workers deserve a raise. The middle class deserves a raise. The cost of living is still too high, and it’s not getting better.”
Prison Reform
In 2020, Scott Colom wrote an opinion column for the Jackson Free Press in which he encouraged Gov. Tate Reeves to assemble a committee to finds and vet people in prisons, for whom the governor could grant clemency. The district attorney’s idea was inspired by the First Step Act that President Donald Trump signed into law in 2018, which set up a panel to review people who are eligible for clemency as a way to safely reduce the prison population. Colom said in an Aug. 29 interview that he still supports the idea, though Reeves never took him up on it.
Colom is a strong proponent of rehabilitating incarcerated people so that they can become skilled, educated workers upon their release from prison. He said one of his top priorities if elected is to make prisons safer and provide more educational opportunities. One way to improve safety is to increase prison guards’ salaries, he noted.
“If somebody goes to prison, what we need to do is make sure that the prison is safe, that there’s educational opportunities—there are rehabilitation opportunities,” he said. “Because the worst thing you can do is release that person back into the community, and you haven’t made the situation better; you’ve made it worse.”
As a district attorney, Colom said he has gotten convictions for 94% of his cases, which all involve “violent offenders.” Instead of imprisoning non-violent first offenders, Colom said he sent many of those people to diversion programs.
“I promise that I will be smart on non-violent first offenders and understand that our young people who make a one-time mistake don’t always need the scars of prison and felonies,” Colom said. “A lot of times, it’s better to give them rehab or to help them try to find a job or try to help them get back on track.”
You can see Scott Colom’s campaign launch video below.
Correction: A caption in this story originally identified Scott Colom incorrectly as a U.S. District attorney; he is a Lowndes County district attorney, though he was previously nominated for a U.S. district court seat.
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