It was 2005 when Scott Colom was working as the only English teacher at a school in a small, impoverished village in Guyana, South America, when one of his students’ mothers passed away while giving birth to another child.
Fresh out of Millsaps College, Colom saw firsthand how her death and poor healthcare in the country affected the kindergarten student in his class, who was orphaned and missed class for a long time while grappling with the loss of his mother.
Located on the northern coast of South America, Guyana is the only primarily English-speaking country in the continent. It was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere at the time in which Colom taught English to kindergarten through sixth-grade students through the World Teach program. The village did not have consistent running water or electricity, and its healthcare outcomes, especially regarding maternal mortality, were poor.
“It was during that whole experience in Guyana that I decided to move back to Mississippi,” Colom told the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 5 during an interview in Jackson, Mississippi. “Because for me, I learned that having a difference in a local community, being a role model for local people, and you know, that the best way to impact change was locally. So, I moved back to Mississippi to try to make a difference.”
The Democrat said being a teacher for 16 months in Guyana was the “toughest job” he had ever had. Inspired by his time in Guyana, Colom is now running to represent Mississippi as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate after an extensive career in the legal field, including a 10-year run as the first Black elected district attorney for the 16th Judicial District of Mississippi.
Over the past year, Colom has spearheaded an aggressive barnstorming campaign across Mississippi, vouching for his hope for Mississippi and criticizing his main opponent, incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. Colom’s efforts have received national attention and a number of prominent Democrats have appeared in Mississippi to campaign with him.
He sat down with the Mississippi Free Press in its Jackson office on Oct. 5 to discuss his policy positions and why he thinks he is the best choice on the ballot to be Mississippi’s next U.S. senator.
‘A Betrayal to Mississippi’
Like Guyana, Mississippi has poor outcomes for maternal health, with Black Mississippians having the highest rate of maternal mortality compared to any other race. And Colom said the U.S. government added onto Mississippi’s woes with a “betrayal” by enacting the Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025, a massive package that cut federal Medicaid and food stamp funding while delivering $1 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
The Democrat said he worried about the potential fallout of the legislation: how many rural hospitals would lose funding and how many Mississippians would lose healthcare coverage. The Center for American Progress estimates that more than 10 million Americans will be uninsured by 2034 as a result of the Big Beautiful Bill. It says Affordable Care Act plan selections have decreased by 1.2 million Americans and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participation dropped four million Americans as of June 2026.
“Well, (U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith) voted for them to go away. Right? Our junior senator,” Colom said. “And so, that was the final straw for me because I know what it means to a child to lose a mom because there’s not good healthcare. We have some of the worst return on healthcare in the country in Mississippi. I know what it means for a community to lose a hospital, and I thought that was such a betrayal to Mississippi that that was the final straw for me.”
If elected to serve in the U.S. Senate, his solution to combat the Big Beautiful Bill is to cancel the Medicaid funding cuts and restore Affordable Care Act subsidies for Americans. The Democrat said he also wants to work on a long-term public healthcare option to allow people who fall into the coverage gap and cannot afford to buy health insurance on the private market the opportunity to enroll in a nonprofit government form of healthcare insurance, Medicaid or Medicare. These changes must happen, he said, or half a million Americans will not have insurance and eight of Mississippi’s rural hospitals will risk closing forever.
“They voted for America First in 2024,” Colom said of people who voted for President Donald Trump. “Well, we’re getting Mississippi last. … We were promised lower costs, but we’re getting higher costs. We were promised no more endless wars, (but) we’re back at war with no end in sight. You know, (we’ve) got gas through the roof, groceries through the roof. We’re promised ‘concepts of a healthcare plan.’ Well, the concept is we don’t have healthcare.”
‘Get Money in People’s Hands Right Now’
One way Colom wants to help put more money into Americans’ wallets is by eliminating the federal income tax for all people making $75,000 or less annually. His original proposal was to cut the federal income tax for teachers and police officers making $75,000 or less yearly, but he decided to modify that policy after meeting a single mother in south Mississippi.
Colom recalled that the mother and her three kids live in George County and she commutes to Louisiana for work. Rising gas prices have made her budget even tighter than usual, and she is struggling to afford food for her kids, relying on her community and family to make ends meet.
“We got to get money in people’s hands right now because otherwise, people are really, really barely getting by,” Colom said.
The Democrat said Trump’s tariffs have been a sales tax on consumers that have driven up grocery prices, while the president’s war with Iran has caused gas prices to rapidly climb upward. Both tariffs and the war have negatively impacted farmers, who rely on selling their products to other countries and need diesel to fuel their farm equipment.
“Republicans love to say they’re not for taxes. Well, they just put one of the biggest sales taxes on Mississippians in decades. Right? That’s what’s got costs through the roof,” Colom said. “And it’s also hurt the supply side because you’ve hurt farmers. Farmers, they were involved in trade; they were selling soybeans and now they lost that customer. So, it’s been bad for them. Then you got the war in Iran, which is making all of us pay more at the gas station, but it’s hurt farmers even more because they got diesel (costs) through the roof.”
Trump never should have entered the war with Iran without approval from Congress, he said, noting that Sen. Hyde-Smith has continuously voted in favor of the president continuing the war.
Jackson resident Arthur Peyton has never seen diesel prices so high in the seven years he has owned Bennett Logistics, a family-operated trucking company in Mississippi that delivers lumber, steel, beverages and dry goods across the country. His two sons who drive the trucks have had to spend up to $700 extra weekly per truck due to higher fuel prices since the start of the Iran War eight months ago. That means they are paying $2,000 to $2,500 on diesel per truck each week when they previously paid $1,700 or $1,800, he said.
To save money, the family is now repairing its own trucks rather than outsourcing repairs to another company. In September, they began decreasing routes from three to four lanes a week to two or three.
“The big thing we have to do is be more selective on which routes we can take,” Peyton told the Mississippi Free Press at a press conference on Oct. 8 near a Shell gas station in Jackson, Mississippi. “The lower paying routes, we just refuse to take them, and we’ll just sit out and not take that lane.”
If elected to the U.S. Senate, Colom proposed a “temporary solution” of suspending the federal gas tax to combat rising gas and diesel prices. Trump recently enacted a temporary relaxation of a law that bans highway vehicles from using red-dyed, off-road diesel. Colom also called upon Congress to make the diesel relief stopgap permanent so that truckers and farmers do not have to pay a tax bill later.
“It’s time to make the diesel stopgap permanent because we don’t need these people worrying about getting a bill later,” he said at the Oct. 8 press conference. “They need to know they got a fighter that’s going to look out for them.”
The U.S. has sent more money cumulatively to Israel than any other nation in the world, at a total of $300 billion from 1946 to 2024, Council on Foreign Relations data show. Colom said “too much money” is going into politics, causing everyday Americans to lose “faith in the system.”
He said he does not take any donations from any corporate lobbyists or corporate political action committees, including AIPAC, the largest pro-Israel political action committee.
Colom said he wants to study what is best for Mississippi when it comes to the U.S. sending billions to Israel for defense weapons each year, noting he would not take a hard stance on Israel at the moment.
“We got to look out for Mississippi and America at this moment,” Colom said. “You got to be looking out for us. And I certainly don’t support any war crimes, any abuses of humanitarian rights and we got to focus on rebuilding the Middle East in a way that respects the dignity of Palestinians, Israelites, Arabs and self-determination for each of them. Because, you know, I’m a big believer, as a Christian and as a Mississippian, that peace is always possible.”
He said he believes peace can happen because in the past, a Black man could not run for Congress nor accept an interview with a white journalist. Racists “fought like the dickens” for Black and white people to never coexist, yet “here we are,” the Democrat added.
‘We Need to be a Department of Rehabilitation’
When Scott Colom was in middle school, he got into a fight with another boy at a football game, causing school leadership to suspend him for three days. No one ever asked why they got into a fight or whether they resolved the conflict, he said.
Colom remembers the fight starting because the other boy thought Colom “looked at him wrong” in the cafeteria. Then, someone taunted Colom and asked if he was scared of the boy, which caused the boys to “spiral out of control,” the Democrat recalled.
Schools, especially middle schools, need a counselor to sit down with kids who get into fights and their parents and ask why it happened and whether it resolved the conflict, he said. Forcing people to talk about their emotions in a healthy way can help release bottled-up feelings that often explode when instigated in a disagreement, the Democrat added, and preventing fights among young people can lead to fewer incarcerations.
Colom said another way for Mississippi to lower its prison population is to focus on rehabilitating incarcerated people through education, counseling and conflict-resolution programs. He also said the State needs to have restorative justice in middle schools to help young people resolve conflicts, like fights at school, especially since social media is so prevalent and can escalate an incident.
“It’s sometimes for people to understand how that’s actually saving money in the long term because the more you reduce recidivism, the more people become taxpayers rather than tax burdens,” he said. “And if we’re going to be a Department of Corrections, we need to be a Department of Rehabilitation because that’s actually going to help taxpayers in the long run. And also, it’s the moral thing to do.”
‘What Are You Going to Do?’
In 2019, a woman incarcerated at the Noxubee County Sheriff’s Department told Scott Colom she was suffering from sexual abuse allegedly at the hands of a sheriff’s deputy, Vance Phillips, who gave her a cellphone in exchange for sex. The woman did not think Colom was going to move forward with the case, especially since then-Sheriff Terry Grassaree was allegedly working to cover up the sexual abuse, the district attorney said.
“And I said to her, ‘Well, OK, if what you’re saying is true, not only am I going to investigate it, I’m going to prosecute it.’ She said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ I said, ‘Give me your cell phone.’ And she gave us the cell phone,” Colom recalled.
He knew then that she was telling the truth because she was not supposed to have a cell phone while in custody. The district attorney gave the phone to his investigator to pose as the incarcerated woman and send Phillips a positive pregnancy test. The deputy responded by asking the woman to meet up.
And who showed up to that meeting? Colom, his investigator and the sheriff’s deputy. Colom passed the case to federal prosecutors because of his concern about gathering an impartial jury in a county with fewer than 10,000 residents. A federal grand jury indicted Grassaree and Phillips in 2022.
In May 2024, Grassaree admitted to lying to the FBI when he told them in 2020 that he had never received nude photos or videos from the incarcerated woman. On Aug. 7, 2024, U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III sentenced the former sheriff to one day in prison, a $2,500 fine and six months of in-home detention for lying to the FBI. Phillips would plead guilty to one charge of bribery. Phillips was not charged with sexual abuse and Grassaree was not charged with covering any alleged abuse up.
Colom shared that story with the Mississippi Free Press because he said it reminded him of what Republicans are doing with the Epstein Files.
Another lie promised to Americans who voted for Trump was that the U.S. government would release the Epstein Files, the Democrat said. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was supposed to trigger the U.S. Department of Justice to release the full files the government has on Epstein except the names of survivors and victims, became federal law in July 2025. But the DOJ has refused to comply and has used legal privileges to only release partial versions and kept some documents hidden. On Oct. 26, 2026, the Democrats of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee released a 50-page staff report that outlines Trump’s alleged involvement in the Epstein files.
The government needs an oversight committee composed of members who are not part of the “Epstein class,” which includes lawmakers who voted against releasing the files, like Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, he added. Hyde-Smith voted to table an amendment that would have required the Justice Department and attorney general to publicly release the federal government’s full files on Jeffrey Epstein. The act was signed into law in November 2025, passing the Senate via unanimous consent.
“We need leaders to have the courage to do us right, even when it’s not popular for that party,” Colom said. “… We’ve got to have leadership that was willing to actually protect victims and do right by people and represent our values.”
‘It’s Not What’s on Voters’ Minds’
Colom was born and raised in Columbus, Mississippi, by his mom, Judge Dorothy Colom, the first Black person to be elected to her region’s chancery court, and dad, Wilbur Colom, an attorney who worked for Ronald Reagan.
Colom returned to the U.S. from Guyana in July 2006 and earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2009. He began his career practicing law at the Mississippi Center for Justice as a staff lawyer before opening his own practice, the Colom Law Firm, from 2011 to 2016. In 2011, the Democrat became the youngest and first Black justice court judge in Lowndes County, Mississippi, before becoming a municipal court judge in Aberdeen, Mississippi, and an interim justice court judge in Lowndes County from 2012 to 2013. He was the first Black city prosecutor for Columbus, Mississippi, working on a part-time basis from 2013 to 2016.
Colom defeated a nearly 30-year incumbent, Forrest Allgood, in 2015, becoming the first Black district attorney for the 16th Judicial District of Mississippi. He coasted to reelection in 2019 as an unopposed incumbent and secured the 2023 election with only a Republican running against him.
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.
Hyde-Smith later explained that she opposed Colom’s nomination because of his support for transgender rights and support from billionaire donor George Soros.
During the final stretch before the election, U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith has been running attack ads claiming Scott Colom is a “transgender defender” who advocates for “sex change surgeries for minors and inmates.” She also claims that “out of state billionaires and millionaires” like Soros are funding the Democrat’s campaign. The Republican’s campaign team even created a fake website using Colom’s name to instigate these claims. His real campaign website can be found here.
“Not one decision I’ve ever made can be tied to a donor,” Colom told the Mississippi Free Press.
The Democrat said he believes in “fairness” in girls’ sports and medical science that says children should not undergo gender-affirming surgeries. He noted that out of all of the town halls he has done during his campaign for U.S. Senate, not one person has brought up this issue to him.
“That’s not a concern. It’s not what is on voters’ minds,” Colom said. “So, it’s really a distraction from the fact that she’s the one who refused to protect victims when it came to releasing the Epstein Files. She has no leg to stand on when it comes to any of these issues.”
He pointed to his record as a district attorney who has won 94% of his trials, landed convictions in 15 high-profile murder cases and closed several cold cases. The Democrat said his experience in the legal field shows that he puts “the people of Mississippi first,” unlike Hyde-Smith.
Colom posted an AI-generated ad on social media on Oct. 1 of Hyde-Smith running out of the U.S. Capitol and into a car away from the press asking her why she made certain policy decisions. But in his interview with the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 5, he criticized Hyde-Smith for receiving campaign donations from AI data center super PAC Leading the Future that is running ads on her behalf.
Colom deleted the ad after he was advised by Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch that the ad may have broken Mississippi law.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman and venture capitalists Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen are spending almost half a million dollars on support ads for Hyde-Smith’s campaign alongside a $1.5 million split between three other Republican Senate candidates across the country. Leading the Future does not want any more government regulations that “constrain AI development,” telling Reuters that would halt the progress and integration of AI.
If voters want lower gas and grocery prices; more accessible and affordable healthcare; and help for farmers and rural hospitals, Colom said they should elect him.
“If you’re OK with all of the corruption and all of the betrayals, listen, Cindy Hyde-Smith is the person you should vote for because she’s promised you nothing different,” Colom said. “… She’s OK with that. She’s not going to fight for any of it. She’s not going to change any of it. She’s offering more of the same.”
“If you want a new direction, somebody who can take us in a better direction, fight for lower costs, fight for better wages, save our healthcare, save our hospitals, stand up to the corruption, put Mississippi values first, I think it’s clear that I am the candidate who can beat Cindy Hyde-Smith and take us in a new direction,” he continued.
Colom, along with incumbent U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and independent candidate Ty Pinkins, will be on Mississippians’ ballots for U.S. Senate in the Nov. 3 election.
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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