Trump heads to Mississippi as midterm election campaigns make final push

U.S. President Donald Trump heads Monday to Mississippi, as he continues a closing midterm campaign blitz that highlights Republicans’ challenges ahead of an election that could drastically shift power in Washington and statehouses across the country.

Mississippi, among the nation’s most reliably Republican states, is not where the GOP envisioned needing a late-October stop from the president. But GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith faces a stiff challenge from Scott Colom, one of many Democratic underdogs that have managed to expand the House and Senate battleground maps because of widespread voter discontent over inflation, the Iran war and other aspects of Trump’s second presidency.

The evening rally with Hyde-Smith will kick off a week that continues to pit Trump against former President Barack Obama, the Democrat he first succeeded in 2017, and former Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat he defeated in 2024 to return to power. Trump’s itinerary has been taking him to many states that he won comfortably in 2024.

Other top nominees and surrogates are greeting voters – almost 30 million of whom have already cast ballots – as Republicans scramble to protect their threadbare majority in the House, shore up a Senate majority that was once thought secure and maintain the GOP’s national advantage in state capitals.

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Harris will campaign in Wisconsin with Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who faces Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Trump ally, for governor. Crowley would be the state’s first Black governor if elected to lead the battleground state.

In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms are getting an assist from Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, chairman of the Democratic Governors’ Association and a likely 2028 presidential candidate, two days after Trump made his second October visit to the state.

Minnesota will be a centre of the progressive movement’s effort to leverage many Americans’ economic struggles. Democratic Senate nominee Peggy Flanagan, the current lieutenant governor, is welcoming House Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., to advocate for a national health insurance plan to achieve universal coverage.

House Democrats also continue to expand their spending footprint, with the House Majority PAC announcing almost US$2.5-million in new spending in Minnesota and Indiana districts that had been considered solid GOP territory earlier in the cycle. The Minnesota seat is a heavily rural and small-town district that has been reliably Republican for generations, other than a recent stretch when Tim Walz, the state’s two-term governor and Democrats’ 2024 vice presidential nominee, represented the sprawling district.

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But it’s Trump’s visit to Mississippi that perhaps brings the midterm landscape into the sharpest relief with just a week of campaigning left before votes are tallied.

To be sure, Hyde-Smith, who is vying for her second full term, remains the favourite in a state Trump won three times by an average of nearly 20 percentage points.

But Colom, a local prosecutor who would make history Mississippi’s first Black senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction, is looking to parlay inflation, Trump’s lagging popularity and Hyde-Smith’s mistakes into an upset.

Colom has outpaced Hyde-Smith in fundraising since he launched his campaign last year, and he caught national attention this month with an ad that played off Hyde-Smith, a former state agriculture commissioner, dismissing beef prices, driven higher by Trump’s tariffs and fuel spikes resulting from the Iran war. The ad features Hyde-Smith saying that consumers “have so many other proteins to choose from,” followed by several characters, and then Colom, saying Mississippi should “pick another senator instead.”

Colom’s campaign followed with a social media video that featured an AI-generated Hyde-Smith dodging questions about that controversy and other issues. The Democrat took down the video after the Mississippi attorney-general said it could violate state law barring the use of deepfakes so close to Election Day.

Senate Democrats’ super PAC, meanwhile, has been a late entry in the contest, with a US$1.2-million investment – a paltry sum compared to Senate contests in more populous states like Texas or Georgia but an amount that can go farther in Mississippi’s smaller television markets.

Mississippians have not chosen a new Democratic senator since 1947, and Democrats last won a Senate race there when that senator, the onetime segregationist John Stennis, won his last re-election in 1982.

Republicans currently hold a 53-47 Senate majority, meaning Democrats must flip at least four seats for a change in control. Republicans began the cycle with a 220-215 advantage in the House, but a national gerrymandering fight made nine Democrats-held seats friendlier to Republicans based on 2024 presidential outcomes in those districts.