Speaking at a rally the University of Mississippi College Democrats hosted on Sept. 25, Cliff Johnson told the crowd his campaign follows one rule: Its people are “joyful warriors.” Then he confessed that he did not feel joyful.
“I am angry,” he said. “We deserve better.”
Johnson, the Democratic nominee for Mississippi’s 1st Congressional District, shared the stage at the Lyric in Oxford, Miss., with Scott Colom, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. Students, longtime Oxford residents and immigrants from other countries filled the room.
Johnson promised the crowd his campaign would “shock the world” in a district where most analysts say a Democrat cannot win. He then spent most of his speech aiming at his opponent, Republican incumbent Rep. Trent Kelly.
If Johnson wins on Nov. 3, he would be the first Democrat to represent the district since Travis Childers served from 2008 to 2010.
‘Something Worse Than Being Sad or Mad’
Johnson built his speech around a story from Washington, D.C. He said he rode in an Uber with a driver from Egypt who asked whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. When Johnson said he was a Democrat, the driver told him Americans do not know what freedom is until it disappears. Johnson asked whether losing it makes people sadder or madder.
“Something worse than either one: hopelessness,” the driver answered.
Johnson said too many people in the 1st District and across Mississippi feel that hopelessness. He painted the picture himself: “Mothers who work every day and still cannot pay the rent, the electric bill or the doctor.” He then argued that Mississippians who call their state the most religious in America should care for one another across lines of race, class, sexuality and party.
He called the election “the most important election of our lifetime” and said he sees an authoritarian government, referring to the Trump administration, dismantling democratic institutions. He urged his supporters to bring their friends and family to the polls.
The audience included longtime Oxford residents who said Johnson’s message matched what they felt.
Simon Sinha, a retired University of Mississippi professor originally from India, has lived in Oxford for about 30 years. “I arrived in the U.S. as a grad student at Stanford, and then I studied at the University of Nebraska before I got a job as a professor at the University of Mississippi. I found the people of Mississippi very friendly,” Sinha said. He and his wife plan to vote for a candidate who works for everyone, regardless of skin color, language or appearance.
Erin McDonald, a mother of five who lives in Oxford, described the state of the country as “scary” and “devastating.”
“If I was to pay my rent and my car note, I couldn’t afford to eat,” McDonald said.
A Fifth-Generation Mississippian
Cliff Johnson, 59, calls himself a fifth-generation Mississippian from a family of farmers. His grandparents sharecropped after the Great Depression, working land they did not own for little money. They eventually saved enough to buy their own small dairy farm.
His parents, high school sweethearts from Tylertown, Mississippi, raised him. They were “kind and thoughtful Republicans,” said Johnson, and they never talked about candidates at the dinner table. They talked about community. “I watched them demonstrate generosity and kindness,” he said.
Johnson said his parents also spared him the racism common among white Mississippians of their generation.
“I’m 59, and I never heard my parents, who were born in 1945, use a racial slur or tell a racist joke,” he said. “They spared me all that. And not many people my age, particularly white people, can say that.” He called that upbringing a gift. “I was given a decent shot at coming out of a Mississippi childhood without anger, resentment and fear.”
He then chose Mississippi College, which he found “far more Baptist than I realized.” Johnson attended a College Republicans meeting his first week because his parents were Republicans. By the end of his sophomore year, he led the College Democrats. Professors who asked him why he believed what he believed pushed him toward history, and the Civil Rights Movement pulled him in.
Johnson joked about why he became a civil rights lawyer. “My parents took me to church every Sunday, and I listened, and I hate a bully,” he said. He said he has never understood the source of the feeling. “I have always gotten very emotional—and yes, angry—when I have watched people with power abuse people who have none,” he said.
At Columbia Law School, he took classes on human rights and on how to challenge power structures. He then returned to Mississippi. Johnson has practiced law for 34 years. He has been married for 36 years to a woman he met at 18 at Mississippi College, and the couple has two adult children, ages 32 and 28.
Why He’s Running
“One thing that I never thought I’d do was run for political office,” Cliff Johnson told the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 8, “and here we sit at High Point Coffee, and I’m running for Congress.”
He pointed to Elon Musk’s role in the second Trump administration as the moment that changed his mind. Johnson called Musk “a profiteer” and said Musk “wielded that power against tens of thousands of federal workers and turned them into villains.” Johnson reacted the way he reacted to civil rights history in college. “It’s probably not a politician’s word,” he said, “but it pissed me off.”
Johnson, who once worked at the U.S. Department of Justice, said he watched career public servants stay on the job as presidents and parties came and went. “They just continued to do good work,” he said. Then the Trump administration fired them. Some stood near the end of their careers in their 50s and 60s, and they did not know whether they could find another job or reach retirement.
That fight, Johnson decided, matched his skills. “I don’t know how to fix a car, and I’m not the best golfer in the world, but one thing I know how to do is fight power,” he said. “And I viewed what was happening in Trump 2.0 as abusive power.”
A Career Spent Challenging the State
Cliff Johnson’s anger comes with a long resume. He prosecuted healthcare fraud as an assistant U.S. attorney during the Clinton administration, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services honored him with its Inspector General’s Integrity Award. He later practiced at Mississippi-based law firms Butler Snow and Pigott & Johnson.
Today, he directs the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law, where he supervises litigation and teaches students in the MacArthur Justice Clinic. His campaign credits him with helping close debtors’ prisons in Corinth, Jackson and Moss Point and with ending the practice of jailing people for months without a lawyer.
In 2023, he sued the state over House Bill 1020 on behalf of three Jackson residents. The law would have let the chief justice appoint unelected judges to Hinds County’s circuit courts and created a state-run municipal court. The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled the appointed circuit judges unconstitutional but let the municipal court stand.
Johnson’s announcement video condemned politicians across the political spectrum and cast Johnson as a Democrat unafraid to challenge the party establishment. He has lived in the Springdale community of Lafayette County for more than 30 years.
Immigration
Cliff Johnson said he wants border control, and he says so plainly. “Of course, we have to control our borders. We cannot have open borders,” he said. He made the same point earlier this year to the Mississippi Media Lab.
He wants a bipartisan group to decide who enters the country.
“I think we can put a bunch of smart people in a room, from across a political spectrum, and make some good decisions about who should be here, who shouldn’t,” he said. He said the group should weigh labor supply, universities, asylum and human rights. He also argued that a sharply falling birth rate makes a total border shutdown risky over the long term.
He draws his sharpest line at how agents enforce the law. “This current version of ICE, whatever this is, this militarized, aggressive entity sweeping through the streets of the U.S., has to be stopped,” Johnson said. He says voters across the district, whether Republican or Democrat, Black or white, rural or urban, dislike the image of masked agents snatching people off the streets. He wants an enforcement agency that is “professional, well trained, demilitarized.” He told the Mississippi Media Lab he would vote to eliminate the masked version of ICE and would back better-trained agents who enforce immigration law within constitutional limits.
Johnson said undocumented immigrants who have worked hard and committed no violence should get a path to permanent status. Those who have committed violent crimes must leave, he said.
“I am committed to the notion that we have to find a pathway for them to have permanent status, whether you call it citizenship, or you call it something else,” he said. “They are our neighbors, they are our friends. We know them from the public schools and from the soccer fields.”
He also rejects the political use of the word immigrant as a threat. “It is bad for our souls, it is bad for our economy,” Johnson said.
The Cost of Living: Housing, Gas and Wages
Cliff Johnson said housing tops the list of worries young people raise with him and that his law students tell him about it constantly. “New grads from law school who want to live in Oxford, for example, probably are gonna have to live in Batesville or Abbeville or Water Valley,” he said.
He blames a shortage of homes. “The problem is a supply shortage,” Johnson said. He said the country has fallen millions of affordable units behind, and he said a bipartisan housing bill reached President Donald Trump’s desk and Trump “refused to sign it,”with the bill becoming law without his signature. He wants tax incentives that make affordable construction profitable for builders, and he wants changes to tariff policy that raise the price of materials.
Johnson also wants to try unconventional ideas. He cites Sweden, where he said about 80% of housing is built off-site, and he describes high-quality modular homes in Oxford that a factory in Alabama built, trucks hauled in and workers assembled in a couple of days. He also mentions 3D-printed housing.
“If we’re gonna keep talking about the American dream, we want to support families, and we want to support stability,” he said. “We have to immediately tackle this issue of housing.” He said the median age of a new homebuyer has climbed to 41, and some young people “can’t even imagine a world where they’ll ever own a home.”
On gas prices, Johnson blames the war with Iran and said Congress must end it. “The first thing that Congress needs to do, and I plan to be a part of it, is immediately demand that that war end,” he said. He said commercial shippers moving through the Strait of Hormuz struggle to insure multimillion-dollar cargoes, and “scarcity is gonna drive the price up.”
A farmer in West Point told Johnson that row-crop farmers who once spent about $1,500 a day on diesel now spend $3,200. “That cost has to be passed along,” Johnson said.
Johnson predicted Democrats will win the House and said they have a decent chance in the Senate. He warns that even a quick end to the war will not fix prices quickly. “It’s gonna take a long time to unravel this mess,” he said, “but we have to begin with ending that war.”
A TikTok video on Johnson’s page shows Jonny Wray, a local farmer who raises grass-fed beef and lamb with his wife. “A lot of farmers were concerned with the start of Iran-US conflict because the prices of diesel and fertilizers would go up,” Wray said.
Wray and other farmers approached Rep. Trent Kelly’s office, but Wray said they never got a chance to speak with him.
“I don’t have to agree with everything that Cliff says, but I do believe a congressman should listen to his constituents, and that is the reason I am voting for Cliff Johnson,” Wray said. In Wray’s view, Johnson is “on the campaign trail and he is making his way all across the district.”
Johnson wants to raise Mississippi’s minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour. He said he did his homework before he took the position and talked with an economist at the University of Mississippi and called Oxford restaurant owners to ask what a raise would do to them. “It’s easy, as a Democrat these days, to say, ‘I would raise the minimum wage,’” he said. He rejects the idea that every percentage point of wage increase pushes prices up by the same amount.
Johnson said the minimum wage has stayed at $7.25 for 17 years while grocery prices have risen 70%. He said a wage that tracked inflation would top $12.50 an hour. “When you have flat wages and extraordinary rising costs, you have to do two things at once,” he said. “Lower the costs in every way you can and increase wages.”
He told the story of a teacher’s aide he met at a festival. She has worked her job for nine years, earns $14.32 an hour and raises her children alone. She cannot afford her medicine. People told her to quit her job to qualify for Medicaid, but she told Johnson she cannot do that. “If I quit my job, I can’t buy groceries or pay the rent,” she told him. “I feel so stuck.”
Johnson uses her story to make a larger point. “People say money can’t buy happiness. That’s not true,” he said. “If you are living on $14.32 an hour, you’re likely quite unhappy and very, very scared.”
Johnson also said he wants policies that cut costs, expand access to affordable health care, secure federal money for economic development, infrastructure and struggling schools, and protect constitutional rights and the vote.
The Odds
Cliff Johnson’s fundraising gives him a platform. His campaign says he raised more than $250,000 in his first 90 days, a record for a 1st District Democrat who relied only on individual contributions.
Johnson’s FEC report shows he has received more than $846,000 in contributions from Oct. 1, 2025 to Oct. 14, 2026. Ninety-four percent of those contributions are individual contributions, and Johnson said he does not take corporate PAC money.
U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democrat who represents Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District, Mississippi Senator-elect Theresa Gillespie Isom and former 1st District nominee Dianne Black have all endorsed Johnson.
Johnson has acknowledged the long odds against a well-funded incumbent in a district that leans heavily Republican. The odds do not scare him, he said.
“I’m comfortable in that space of people telling me you’ll never win,” Johnson said. He said his civil rights work taught him to live as part of a minority view on the criminal legal system and on economic policy, and he has won in court against long odds.
He also talked with 1st District resident and 2023 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, who lost the popular vote in the 1st District, Presley’s home district. Johnson drew a lesson from it. “The 1st District cannot be a place where Democrats go to die,” he said. “It cannot be a place that forgets its roots as the home of working-class Mississippians. This is not a wealthy district.”
Johnson said the district’s working families are “getting crushed by these Trump economic policies.” He offered that people connect to one another across political, racial and class lines. If he loses after working as hard as he can, he said, he will accept it. “I will sleep like a baby on the night of November 3rd and feel good about what we’ve done.”
Voters Who Have Never Voted Democrat
Cliff Johnson said he meets voters who tell him they like him but cannot vote for a Democrat. He asks them why. Many answer, “I’m a Christian,” and he responds to them that he is one, too. Some bring up social issues. Johnson said he resists the urge to get frustrated and asks what problems weigh on them most. They name gas, grocery and housing prices, and they name insurance and access to health care.
He answers with an image. “If you’re drowning in the ocean, you don’t ask whether it’s gonna rain,” Johnson said. “We got people focused on the rain.”
He tells Republican friends in the district they do not have to switch parties.
“This isn’t the party of George W. Bush. It’s sure not the party of Ronald Reagan,” he said. “You can maintain your Republican identity with your friends and community, and you can vote for a Democrat at this time when things are going badly in America.”
Johnson predicts Republicans will “quietly go to the polls” and vote for Democrats on Nov. 3 because they can no longer bear the pain of the current administration. He said he refuses to “communicate hate, or blame people for votes they’ve cast in the past.”
What Johnson Wants Voters to Remember
Johnson told Ballotpedia in a 2025 survey that his campaign rests on three messages: “Working People Matter,” “Democracy Matters” and “Independence Matters.”
“While wages remain flat, prices for everything from groceries to housing to health care are soaring,” Johnson wrote. He blamed the Trump administration and its supporters for focusing on tax cuts for the super-rich while corporations enjoy record profits. He summed up his approach in three words: “I fight bullies!”
On democracy, Johnson warns that the Trump administration has weakened the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances. He said the politicization of the military, attacks on the judiciary and the dismantling of federal agencies leave the country less safe. He defends federal workers, including those at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and said they are not villains. He repeated that point when he described the firings that pushed him to run.
On independence, he described himself as a lifelong Democrat who answers to Mississippians, not to a party.
The Side Voters Haven’t Seen
Johnson said a campaign hides one’s lighter side. “I’m pretty silly,” he said. He has performed the entire first “Rapper’s Delight” rap song at a talent show, sings Hank Williams Jr. karaoke and tries the stanky leg at weddings, though he admits he is not good at it.
“I am committed to the idea that life is meant to be filled with joy and fun,” he said.
It is the same idea he preached at the Oxford rally. There, Johnson closed by asking the crowd to picture the morning of the election.
“We want the best for you. No matter who you are, no matter where you come from, we want the best for you. I want you to have a fair shot at life just like I want a fair shot at life. When you get there on Nov. 3, we’re gonna ask ourselves that morning, are we ready?” Johnson said as he wrapped up his speech in Oxford on Sept. 25, 2026.
Mississippians will vote for candidates running for federal, regional and local offices in the general election on Tuesday, Nov. 3. Mississippians must have registered to vote by Oct. 5 to cast their ballot in the upcoming election. Check your voter registration by visiting sos.ms.gov or by calling your county circuit clerk’s office.
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