President Donald Trump is heading to a state where national Republicans rarely have to campaign on Monday night.
Trump will rally in Corinth, Mississippi, for Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who faces an unexpectedly competitive challenge from Democrat Scott Colom, a district attorney from Columbus. Trump won the state by about 23 points in 2024 and will headline the event at the Crossroads Arena as Hyde-Smith fights to hold her seat.
Democrats have grown increasingly optimistic about Colom, whose campaign has gained traction after an ad attacking Hyde-Smith on beef prices went viral. Although winning in a state Democrats have not carried since 1982 remains a challenge, Trump's approval rating in Mississippi has fallen to its lowest level of either term, giving Democrats another reason to see an opportunity.
The party sent former Vice President Kamala Harris to Mississippi last Thursday to raise Colom's profile. If elected, he would become the state's first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction ended.
Newsweek reached out to the Hyde-Smith and Colom campaigns for comment Monday.
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How to Watch Trump's Mississippi Rally
The rally is at the Crossroads Arena, 2800 South Harper Road in Corinth. Doors open at 2:30 p.m. local time, the program begins at 4:30 p.m. and Trump is scheduled to speak at 6 p.m. Central, or 7 p.m. Eastern, according to the Republican Party's event page.
Attendees have to register in advance, with a limit of four tickets per sign-up.
Where the Mississippi Senate Race Stands
A 365 Project poll taken October 21-22 by the Democratic firm Change Research had Hyde-Smith at 43 percent and Colom at 40 percent, with the margin of error at plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Independent Ty Pinkins, a lawyer, drew 6 percent, enough to matter in a race this tight.
All of the public polling has come from Democratic-aligned firms, and averages still favor the incumbent. The Pollsmax average gave Hyde-Smith a lead of about 7 points and its model put her chances of winning at roughly 93 percent. Prediction market Kalshi had her near 89 percent on Monday.
The Cook Political Report moved the race from Solid Republican to Likely Republican last week. Sabato's Crystal Ball and NBC News also have it at Likely Republican, while Inside Elections has it Solid Republican.
Colom has been campaigning on healthcare cuts, beef and grocery prices and Hyde-Smith's support for Trump's tax and spending law. He responded to news of the rally by saying: "Hyde-Smith is scared and that's why she's sending Donald Trump down here," in a statement to Mississippi Today, and challenged Trump to a debate.
Brandon Jones, a Mississippi Democratic strategist and former state representative who works on political campaigns for the SPLC Action Fund, said the incumbent has left an opening.
"The public polling in this race has been close since last year and the Hyde-Smith campaign has been silent on the price of diesel, runaway inflation and the war in Iran," Jones told Newsweek, calling those issues the ones at the top of voters' minds.
Gerard Henderson, Colom's campaign manager, told the Associated Press that the campaign has "the resources and momentum to win."
Will Trump Help or Hurt Hyde-Smith?
Trump's stop follows a Thursday visit from Harris, her second trip to Mississippi in the past year.
Hyde-Smith welcomed the visit before it was even confirmed, telling reporters in Vicksburg last week that the president was trying to help and that she was fine with him coming.
Hayes Dent, a Mississippi-based Republican strategist and president of Hayes Dent Public Strategies, told Newsweek that Trump's visit could cost Hyde-Smith votes but is unlikely to change the outcome of the race.
"Given the drag on the ticket that Trump has now become, I believe he will probably hurt Cindy by 3 or 4 points, but it won't matter because she's an immensely popular senator here in the state," Dent said. "Trump is an outlier now, and he's about to become a lame duck."
Jones read the visit as a sign of Republican worry.
"President Trump is in Mississippi because Republicans believe Cindy Hyde-Smith is in trouble," he said. "This may be the first time a visit from Trump doesn't help the Republican candidate here. He'd probably still take Mississippi, but I'm not sure his voters are thrilled with him right now."
Other Mississippi Republicans read the trip as a pure turnout play. Republican National Committee member Henry Barbour, a nephew of former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, told WLBT in Jackson that a big turnout favors Hyde-Smith, while a low one could put Colom in the Senate. Henry Barbur's brother, Austin Barbour, a longtime Republican operative in the state, made a similar point to The Hill, saying that "it's a turnout game as every election is."
Hyde-Smith has a record of trailing Trump on the ballot. In 2020, she won her first full term by 10 points while he carried the state by more than 16, a 6-point gap. This year, Trump is not on the ballot and his approval rating in the state is underwater.
She told reporters that the national Democratic visits show how red Mississippi is, and Republicans have folded Harris into their attack ads against Colom.
Dent agreed, describing Harris and Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Raphael Warnock of Georgia as "poison pills" for Democrats seeking support in a state like Mississippi. He said a Democrat hoping to compete statewide should be seen with law enforcement and focus on the Second Amendment and border security.
Trump's Approval Rating in Mississippi
Trump won Mississippi in 2024 by about 23 points over Harris, extending a Republican presidential streak in the state that dates to 1980.
Civiqs' rolling tracker of registered voters now has his approval in Mississippi at 41 percent and his disapproval at 52 percent, a net rating of -11 as of October 21, the worst reading it has logged in the state across both of his terms.
In March, the same tracker had Trump at 49 percent approval and 46 percent disapproval. His numbers bobbed around even through the spring, then went negative in June and have stayed there.
Mississippi is still friendlier to Trump than the country as a whole. National polling averages compiled on October 22 had his approval near 36 percent and his disapproval above 61 percent, close to record lows for either of his terms.
Pollsters and analysts have tied the decline in part to the war with Iran and tariff fights that have pushed up consumer prices. Corinth is in the state's 1st Congressional District, which Trump carried with 68 percent of the vote in 2024.
Why Republicans Are Spending in Mississippi
The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the main super PAC aligned with Senate GOP leadership, launched an ad campaign in the "low seven figures" in Mississippi last week, Semafor reported. By Sunday night the group had reserved $1.3 million in airtime, according to AdImpact data cited by NBC News, roughly matching the Senate Majority PAC's $1.2 million buy for Colom.
The SLF ad casts Colom as too liberal, ties him to billionaire George Soros, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and hits him on transgender issues.
Only two weeks earlier, SLF operatives had looked at Idaho, South Dakota and Mississippi and decided none of them needed money, Axios reported. One national Republican operative summed up the mood to the outlet in two sentences: "The wall has broken. The enemy is inside the fort."
Mississippi's sum is small next to Ohio or Iowa. But it joins Kansas and South Carolina on a list of deep-red states where Republicans are now playing defense, and the race has seen nearly $8 million in ads from October 1 through Election Day on November 3, with Democrats outspending Republicans about $5 million to $2.7 million, according to CNN. Among the campaigns, Colom had outspent Hyde-Smith roughly $4.6 million to $3.2 million as of last week, according to AdImpact data cited by AP.
Jake Monssen, Hyde-Smith's campaign manager, told CNN that the senator had not asked her party for more resources.
"We are confident that Senator Hyde-Smith will win on November 3rd," he said in a statement.
Hyde-Smith waved off the late talk about polls as noise when reporters asked her last week.
Senator Roger Wicker, the state's senior Republican senator, told Mississippi Today that Mississippi remains very much a Republican state at the federal level and that he believes Hyde-Smith still leads.
"There's a lot of laws of physics in politics," Dent said.
Once national Democrats and their outside groups move into a state, he argued, Republicans feel they have to match them, which he called "a natural sort of push, pull reaction to what the other side is doing." On the ground, he predicted, Hyde-Smith wins "by probably 10 points."
For Jones, the spending itself is the story.
"I think we all would have been surprised if someone had told us in January that President Trump was going to spend the waning days of the election trying to bail out a Republican incumbent in Mississippi," he said. "It's the latest indication that Democrats are probably about to win elections in places that no one saw coming."
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Black Voters Hold the Key for Colom
Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state, at nearly 38 percent. Colom would become the state's first Black U.S. senator since the end of Reconstruction, but getting there will require strong turnout among Black voters and support from white voters.
A Democrat needs a large Black turnout and roughly one-quarter of the white vote to win, Mississippi NAACP Executive Director Charles Taylor told CNN. No Democrat has managed that combination in a Senate race since John C. Stennis in 1982.
There are signs that Democrats could be making progress. Democratic primary turnout this year was up 90 percent from the previous cycle, and the NAACP's first major voter registration drive since 2012 added more than 17,000 people to the rolls, Taylor told CNN.
Data for Progress found in an August survey that Black voters were more enthusiastic about voting than white voters, 43 percent to 31 percent. It estimated that Black voters made up just under 32 percent of the electorate. If their share rose to 35 percent, Hyde-Smith's 6-point lead in the model would shrink to 4.
Jones set Colom's targets at about the same level.
"To win, Colom will probably need Black voters to make up around 35 percent of the electorate and he'll need to win just over 25 percent of the white vote," he said.
Terrance Woodbury, president of the Democratic research firm HIT Strategies, used the term "blacklash" in an interview with CNN to describe the backlash against Republican efforts to curb Black political power, including the push to dismantle Mississippi's 2nd Congressional District, represented in the U.S. House by Democrat Bennie Thompson.
Dent is skeptical that Democrats can assemble a winning coalition. Few white Democrats remain in the state, he said, and "with African Americans having 37 percent of the statewide population, it's just simply not enough to carry the day." The coalition can work in legislative districts and Thompson's congressional district, Dent argued, "but not across the state."
Turnout could be especially important because Mississippi has no early in-person voting. Only voters who qualify for absentee ballots can vote before Election Day, and in-person absentee voting closes at noon on Saturday.
Trump and Vance Spend the Final Week in Red States
After Corinth, Trump's closing schedule stays mostly in states he won comfortably in 2024: Lubbock and Corpus Christi, Texas, on Tuesday for Senate nominee Ken Paxton, then Chillicothe, Ohio, on Wednesday. He heads to Daytona Beach, Florida, on Friday and to Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday, alongside Senate candidate Ashley Hinson.
Vice President JD Vance holds rallies on Monday in Belgrade, Montana, and also in Topeka, Kansas, where Senator Roger Marshall faces Democrat Adam Hamilton, a megachurch pastor, a week after Trump rallied near Wichita. Vance goes to Weatherford, Texas, on Thursday. His one swing-state stop this week is Howell, Michigan, on Tuesday.
Trump has pitched these trips as turnout drives, telling crowds at earlier rallies to vote as if he were on the ballot.
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Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Dave Siminoff.