Senator Warnock says donors laughed when he told them to invest in Scott Colom’s Mississippi race

With Scott Colom nearing a historic Senate victory, the Georgia senator says Democrats must rethink where they invest their resources.

U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock isn’t surprised that Scott Colom is likely on the verge of victory in Mississippi’s closely watched U.S. Senate race.

This past Spring, Warnock urged Democratic donors to invest in the race, despite the state having elected a Republican in every U.S. Senate race since 1988. The U.S. Senator and pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, who was elected twice in Georgia and helped turn the southern state blue for the first time in 30 years, told the room of donors, “There’s one race I think we’re sleeping on, and that is Mississippi.”

According to audio of the exchange obtained by theGrio, Warnock was quickly met with laughter. However, he made the case for Colom, touting his background as a prosecutor and a fifth-generation Mississippi native.

“They literally laughed,” Warnock told theGrio as he reflected on the closed-door event.

Now, Colom is close to making history as the first Black American from Mississippi elected to the U.S. Senate since the Reconstruction Era. In response, Senator Warnock asserted, “Well, I think I had the last laugh. More importantly, Mississippi and Scott Colom have the last laugh.”

He continued, “Hopefully we will translate that laughter into a reimagining about what’s possible and we will invest accordingly.”

Warnock has also put his money where his mouth is. He raised $750,000 directly into Colom’s campaign, and regularly urged his donors to back the Mississippi Democrat.

Colom’s likely victory in Mississippi is part of a trend of Democratic success in southern states in last week’s midterm elections. Democrats pulled out major and historic wins in U.S. House, Senate and gubernatorial races in Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina and Alabama.

“The road to a sustainable Democratic majority runs right through the South,” said Warnock, who barnstormed in several southern states for candidates like Scott Colom, Dr. Annie Andrews in South Carolina, Roy Cooper in North Carolina,

The Georgia U.S. Senator, who is a rumored 2028 presidential candidate, said he hopes Colom’s race will finally compel the Democratic Party to invest more in the U.S. South, where Black Americans make up sizable portions of the population.

“The South is the fastest growing region in the country, period, and it’s the only region in the country that’s growing in every age population group,” said Warnock, who noted the “reverse migration” of Black Americans leaving the north and returning to their roots in the South.

So much of the United States’ history is steeped in the South, notes Warnock.

“There was a big debate that happened in our country in the three or four decades leading into the Civil War. The South was at the center of that vexatious debate about what it means to be a union, and the question of slavery was central to that debate,” he said. “Then there was a civil rights movement a hundred years later; the terrain upon which that noble fight to finally create what Dr. King called the “beloved community” happened in the South.”

As Mississippi—and the nation—awaits the final vote count in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race, Senator Warnock is confident Democrats will have something to celebrate in the ensuing hours or days. He told theGrio, “I look forward to welcoming Scott Colom to the Senate.”