Every vote counts
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Across the Mississippi Delta — poor, Black, rural — there were houses like the one where Smith was busy at work, where organizers spent months figuring out how to get a community of nonvoters excited about reengaging in democracy.
When Colom was trying to figure out the final message for his Senate campaign, he and his team chose to end with a commercial about Medgar Evers, the African American veteran whom white supremacists killed as he was conducting voter registration campaigns.
“We can’t just ask people to vote for me,” Colom said in an interview with The Washington Post on Thursday morning. “We just got to talk about sacrifice. We got to talk about the importance of voting.”
It was also about stressing the idea of what he called “Mississippi Values” — including Evers’s audacious and righteous response to abusive power. Those values were revealed in the work of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Party, and others who worked during the Civil Rights Era to break some of the most racist policies in the South. Still, Colom knew it would take a herculean effort in a place that hadn’t elected a Black politician to statewide office since the fall of Reconstruction.
Smith just focused on reaching would-be voters where she grew up in Holmes County. It is one of the smaller counties in the state — about 15,000 people, 80 percent Black, with 34 percent living below the poverty line. But it was a place where Colom could run up the score to offset Whiter, more conservative districts.
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