Sen.-elect Scott Colom says investing in the South can help Democrats win ‘a durable majority’

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Sen.-elect Scott Colom, D-Miss., emphasized in that Democrats need to invest more in southern states like Mississippi, where he flipped the seat blue for the first time in decades.

Sen.-elect Scott Colom, D-Miss., emphasized in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Democrats need to invest more in southern states like Mississippi, where he flipped the seat blue for the first time in decades.

“What we need to do now as a Democratic Party is understand we can’t continue to allow that lack of investment to occur,” he said on Sunday.

Colom’s projected win last week brought Democrats to a 55-seat majority in the Senate, with the Alaska Senate race yet to be called. His victory over incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Republican, marked a seismic political shift in a state that last elected a Democrat to the Senate 44 years ago and has not had a Black senator since the Reconstruction period.

Colom has been vocal in calling for Democrats to focus more on states like Mississippi, a sentiment he emphasized again on Sunday.

“We need to put senators like myself in positions where we can deliver for the rural South, where we can be leaders in ways that show the voters in rural America that we care about them, the voters in the Deep South that we want them to be successful,” Colom said.

“And if we do that, I think we can have a competitive elections every cycle and put ourselves in positions where we can have a durable majority,” he continued.

In the same interview, Colom identified reshaping tariff policies as his top priority to reduce prices.

“We’ve got to fight for low tariffs to lower costs that helps our farmers because they lost customers as a result of these tariffs, and we need to do everything in our power to help them get those customers back,” Colom said.

He also called for raising the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage sits at $7.25 per hour, and it has not been raised since 2009.

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