MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough said Thursday that Republican and Supreme Court attacks on Black voting rights backfired, powering a wave that carried Democrat Scott Colom to victory in Mississippi — including in a county named for the Ku Klux Klan’s first grand wizard.
Speaking on “Morning Joe,” Scarborough argued that Colom, Georgia Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms and other Black leaders won in part because of the assault on civil rights and voting rights carried out by the right. He pointed to what he called the Supreme Court’s assault on the Civil Rights Act, and to Republicans openly echoing segregationists’ view that it never should have passed.
“So these very things Republicans were doing, these very things the Supreme Court was doing, these very things the White House was doing to try to rig the system politically blew up in their face and caused a landslide unlike any other we have seen for most of our lifetimes,” Scarborough said.
Co-host Jonathan Lemire noted that Colom carried Forrest County, named for Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan’s first grand wizard, and Jefferson Davis County, named for the president of the Confederacy. Fellow host Willie Geist added that Trump won Forrest County by 18 points two years ago, while Colom took it by 10.
Colom unseated Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith after more than a week of ballot counting, with the Associated Press calling the race Wednesday. He will be Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction and the first Democrat the state has elected to the Senate since 1982. Bottoms, who won Georgia’s governor’s race last week, will be the nation’s first Black woman governor.
Geist said Colom’s viral ad, which mocked Hyde-Smith’s response to rising beef prices when she said that voters had other proteins to choose from, may have been decisive.
Earlier in the segment, the Rev. Al Sharpton called Colom’s win a message “to the Supreme Court and others, you can gerrymander all you want, but we still are going to break through.”
The court’s April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais weakened Section 2’s protections against racially discriminatory maps. Republicans in several states then moved to break up majority-Black districts, and Black early voting then surged across the South, with stark jumps in Louisiana and South Carolina.
Lemire said Southern states had rushed to redraw maps after the ruling, on top of redistricting Trump pushed starting in Texas, and that Black Americans who felt disenfranchised were highly motivated to vote.