CORINTHE, Miss. (AP) – President Donald Trump visits Mississippi on Monday, as he pursues a fence midterm campaign blitz It highlights Republicans’ challenges heading into an election that could radically shift power in Washington and in states across the country.
While the president was scheduled to appear alongside Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, his Democratic challenger was also seen at his rally venue, creating the rare spectacle of Trump’s most loyal supporters interacting directly with one of the very figures the president will surely denigrate on stage later. Scott Colom said earlier Monday that he plans to go listen to what Trump supporters think.
“They deserve a senator who listens to them, who actually cares about what they think, who actually cares about what they’re going through,” Colom said before the president arrived for the evening.
Colom’s spokesperson later posted a photo onclaiming he had “chatted with people waiting in line for the Trump rally because Scott is running to represent ALL Mississippians.”
Mississippi, one of the most reliably Republican states in the country, is not where the Republican Party envisioned it would need a shutdown by the president in late October. But Hyde-Smith faces a major challenge of Colom, one of several Democratic outsiders who managed to expand the House and Senate battleground maps thanks to widespread voter discontent on inflation, the war in Iran and other aspects of Trump’s second presidency.
Colom said the dynamic made it easy for him to make the case to Trump rally attendees that Hyde-Smith “is not going to change a single thing” that makes voters’ lives more difficult.
“If you want someone who is going to fight for higher wages, lower costs, to get us out of this stupid war, for affordable and accessible health care, to really end the corruption that is ruining our country, to really represent our Mississippi values, vote for Scott Colom,” he said.
Trump’s event with Hyde-Smith will kick off a week that will include other stops declares he won comfortably in 2024, notably in Texas, South Carolina and Iowa.
Democrats, including progressives, are stepping up their efforts
Top candidates and surrogates were greeting voters — nearly 30 million of whom have already cast ballots — as Democrats try to end Republicans’ threadbare majority in the House, take control of a Senate majority that was once considered safe for Republicans and end the Republican Party’s national advantage in state capitals.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, was scheduled to campaign in Wisconsin with the Milwaukee County executive. David Crowley, who is facing Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Trump ally, for governor. Crowley would be the state’s first black governor if elected to lead the battleground state.
Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms were receiving support from Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association and a likely 2028 presidential candidate, two days after Trump made his second visit to the state in October.
In Minnesota, Democratic Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan, the current lieutenant governor, hosted House Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., to advocate for a national health insurance plan aimed at achieving universal coverage.
“Everywhere I go on this tour, I meet Minnesotans who work hard and do everything right and still can’t afford to take care of themselves or the people they love,” Flanagan said, supported by Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont. Flanagan is running against former sportscaster Michele Tafoya for the vacant seat.
Vance travels to Kansas to help a Republican senator
Vice President JD Vance visited Kansas on behalf of Senator Roger Marshall, who is in a tight competition with Democratic candidate and pastor Adam Hamilton. Hundreds of people were gathered at the warehouse of a steel manufacturing company in north Topeka, in a state where Democrats have not won a Senate race since 1932.
Marshall told the crowd that Trump was on the ballot, even though his name did not appear, because Democrats would thwart his agenda if they took control of Congress.
“The Democrats are running like it’s a presidential year,” he said, calling for Republican Party enthusiasm to match the Democrats’ energy.
Jace Sullivan, a 50-year-old electrician from Topeka who describes himself as “85 percent Republican,” said Trump supporters should “circle the wagons” and go vote.
Wearing a red “JD Vance for President 2028” shirt, he said he believed Trump was rightly working to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
“Gas prices are high and it really sucks, but it’s a means to an end,” Sullivan said.
Earlier, Vance was in Belgrade, Mont., campaigning with Republican Aaron Flint, who faces Democrat Sam Forstag in the race for the state’s 1st Congressional District, and Republican Senate candidate Kurt Alme.
Trump will rally in another reliably Republican state
But perhaps it is Trump’s visit to Mississippi that most highlights the midterm landscape, just a week before the campaign.
To be sure, Hyde-Smith, who is seeking a second full term, remains the favorite in a state that Trump has won three times by an average of nearly 20 percentage points.
But Colom, a local prosecutor who will make history as Mississippi’s first black senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction, is seeking to spin inflation, Trump’s declining popularity and Hyde-Smith’s mistakes to create an upset.
Colom has outpaced Hyde-Smith in fundraising since he launched his campaign last year, and he gained national attention this month with an ad that featured Hyde-Smith rejecting beef prices — driven higher by Trump’s tariffs and fuel spikes resulting from the Iran conflict. The ad features Hyde-Smith, a former state agriculture commissioner, saying consumers “have so many other proteins to choose from,” followed by several characters, then Colom, saying Mississippi should ” choose another senator instead. »
The Senate Democrats’ super PAC was a late registration for the competitionwith an investment of $1.2 million. Mississippians haven’t chosen a new Democratic senator since 1947, and Democrats last won a Senate race there when that senator, former segregationist John Stennis, won his last re-election in 1982.
Meanwhile, in New York, one of the party’s most vulnerable members of the House of Representatives has removed himself from Trump’s campaign playbook. Rep. Mike Lawler, who is in a tight race with Democrat Cait Conley in New York’s northern suburbs, ran a McDonald’s drive-thru – imitating something Trump did two years ago, even as Lawler tried to emphasize his independence from the president.
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Barrow reported from Atlanta and Colvin from New York. Associated Press reporter John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas; Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina; Laura Turbay in St. Paul, Minn.; Seung Min Kim in Belgrade, Montana; and Anthony Izaguirre in New York contributed.
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