历史的回响环绕着斯科特·科洛姆（Scott Colom）冲刺胜利的最后阶段，但组建推动他的那支联盟，是在民主党多次失利之后经由艰苦努力才凑成的。
The echoes of history surround Scott Colom’s final push toward victory, but assembling the coalition that propelled him took hard work after many Democratic misses.
周二清早，安吉拉·刘易斯（Angela Lewis）下了通宵的精神科护士夜班，开车来到密西西比州梅里迪安的投票站，然后坐在停车场祈祷。
On Tuesday morning, Angela Lewis got off her overnight shift as a psychiatric nurse, drove to her polling place in Meridian, Miss., and then sat in the parking lot and prayed.
那天早上，她祈求上帝的旨意成就；前一天，她向父亲詹姆斯·钱尼（James Chaney）说了一句感谢的祷告，钱尼是1964年6月、在她出生几天后被密西西比州三K党成员杀害的三名民权组织者之一。正是因为有像她父亲这样的人，她才拥有了投票权。
That morning, she asked that God’s will be done; the day before, she said a prayer of thanks to her father, James Chaney, one of the three civil rights organizers murdered by Mississippi Klansmen in June 1964, days after she was born. It is because of people like her father that she could vote at all.
她周二前来投票支持的那个人是斯科特·科洛姆，他现在似乎正逐步走向成为重建时期以来密西西比州首位黑人联邦参议员。
The man she had come to vote for on Tuesday was Scott Colom, who now appears to be edging toward becoming the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.
在科洛姆先生的支持者中，普遍的情绪是：一位黑人民主党人的胜利只是时间问题。
Among Mr. Colom’s supporters, the prevailing sentiment is that a Black Democrat’s victory was simply a matter of time.
罗里·多伊尔/《纽约时报》摄“我给所有孩子都打了电话，”刘易斯女士说，“我告诉他们，如果爱我、如果以后还想跟我说话，明早最好从床上爬起来去投票。”他们真的去了，就像成千上万的黑人选民、白人选民、热情的大学生、愤怒的郊区居民和不满的小镇保守派一样，这支空前的联盟让密西西比站在了历史的门槛上。如果他获胜，科洛姆先生将接任希拉姆·雷韦尔斯（Hiram Revels）曾担任的席位，雷韦尔斯是美国首位黑人参议员，于1870年、重建时期中期当选。
Rory Doyle for The New York Times“I called all my kids,” Ms. Lewis said, “and I told them that if they love me and if they ever want to talk to me again, they better get out of that bed in the morning and they better go vote.”They did, as did hundreds of thousands of Black voters, white voters, enthusiastic college students, angry suburbanites and discontented small-town conservatives, an unparalleled coalition that has put Mississippi on the cusp of history. If he wins, Mr. Colom will take the seat once held by Hiram Revels, the nation’s first Black senator, who was elected in 1870, the middle of the Reconstruction era.
密西西比州上一位黑人参议员布兰奇·K·布鲁斯（Blanche K. Bruce）于1875年至1881年任职，当时重建时期已近尾声，他对黑人选民面临的暴力表示担忧，但表达了对“我的人民的耐力、能力和命运”的信心。周六上午，在布鲁斯离任145多年后，现年43岁、性格开朗的哥伦布市（Columbus）地区检察官科洛姆（Colom）领先2500多票，鉴于尚未计票的地区，许多人认为这一优势将保持甚至扩大。
The last Black senator from Mississippi, Blanche K. Bruce, served from 1875 to 1881, as Reconstruction was in its final days, raising alarms about the violence faced by Black voters but expressing his confidence “in the endurance, capacity and destiny of my people.”On Saturday morning, more than 145 years after Mr. Bruce left office, Mr. Colom, 43, a gregarious district attorney from Columbus, Miss., was ahead by more than 2,500 votes, a margin that many believed would hold or even grow given the areas where uncounted votes still remain.
他的共和党对手、现年67岁的参议员辛迪·海德-史密斯（Cindy Hyde-Smith）坚称自己将获胜，大批律师已飞抵密西西比州监督计票。向州政府提交认证结果的截止日期是周五。
His Republican opponent, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, 67, has insisted that she will prevail, and armies of lawyers have flown into Mississippi to monitor the vote count. The deadline for certification to the state is Friday.
“我们不会退缩，”海德-史密斯上周在其竞选社交媒体账号上表示，“选举尚未结束。”科洛姆的选举表现可能是辛勤工作与运气的结合，一位技艺高超的候选人在恰当的时机开展了一场精明的竞选。但历史在密西西比州沉重地悬而未决，其意义深远。今年黑人选民的大规模投票，部分是对密西西比州及南方其他地区重新划分选区、将国会和州议会中的黑人占多数选区拆分的努力的反应。
“We are not backing down,” Ms. Hyde-Smith said last week on her campaign social media accounts. “This election is not over.”The circumstances behind Mr. Colom’s electoral performance may be a combination of hard work and luck, a skilled candidate running a sharp campaign at just the right time. But history hangs heavy in Mississippi, and the significance is profound. The huge Black turnout this year was in part a reaction to efforts in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South to redraw district lines that would cut up majority-Black seats in Congress and in state legislatures.
在科洛姆的支持者中，普遍情绪是黑人民主党人的胜利只是时间问题。外界看来惊人的事情，在许多当地人眼中，不过是一道终于解出的数学题。
Among Mr. Colom’s supporters, the prevailing sentiment is that a Black Democrat’s victory was simply a matter of time. What seems so astounding to outsiders is seen by many here as a math problem that has finally been solved.
科洛姆在竞选早期表示，他知道必须“让年轻人关心这场选举”。“这迟早会发生，”39岁、梅里迪安市（Meridian）一名中学科学教师的恩斯派尔·沃克（N’spire Walker）说。她说，直到选举前一天晚上参加科洛姆的集会，看到现场白人和黑人难分伯仲，她才不确定今年是否就是那一年。“就是那一刻我意识到了，”她说。
Mr. Colom said early in his campaign that he knew he had “to get young people to care about this election.”“It was coming,” said N’spire Walker, 39, a middle school science teacher in Meridian, Miss. She was not sure if this was going to be the year until the evening before the election, she said, when she went to a rally for Mr. Colom and couldn’t tell if there were more white people or Black people. “That’s when I knew,” she said.
密西西比州的政治算术并不复杂。该州黑人人口占比约为37%，是全美各州中比例最高的，且绝大多数投给民主党，因此民主党候选人在全州范围内竞选拥有较高的基本盘。但由于白人人口绝大多数支持共和党，民主党人的得票上限并不远高于这个基本盘。2008年，贝拉克·奥巴马首次竞选总统时，黑人选民投票率创下纪录，他获得了43%的选票。
Mississippi’s political math is not complicated. The state’s Black population, which overwhelmingly votes Democratic, is around 37 percent, the largest proportion of any state, so a Democratic candidate running statewide has a high floor. But with a white population that is overwhelmingly Republican, the ceiling for a Democrat is not far from that floor. In 2008, Barack Obama’s first campaign saw a record turnout of Black voters, and he drew 43 percent of the vote.
因此，密西西比州一位成功的民主党候选人需要激发黑人选民的高投票率，同时赢得大约四分之一的白人选票。自1982年约翰·斯坦尼斯成为最后一位在密西西比州赢得美国参议员席位的民主党人后，民主党人开始在各级选票上接连失利。
A successful Democratic candidacy in Mississippi thus needs to spur a high turnout among Black voters while winning roughly a quarter of the white vote. After 1982, when John Stennis became the last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in Mississippi, Democrats began to lose races up and down the ballot.
但在奥巴马执政年代，全州范围内的民主党人几乎被彻底清除后，一些候选人开始播下东山再起的种子：迈克·埃斯皮，前民主党众议员、首位担任农业部长的黑人男性，在2018年的参议员特别选举中，仅以约7个百分点之差败给了海德-史密斯女士。
But after the Obama years, when statewide Democrats were all but wiped out, some candidates started sowing the seeds of a comeback: Mike Espy, a former Democratic House member and the first Black man to serve as agriculture secretary, came about seven points short of Ms. Hyde-Smith in a special election for the Senate seat in 2018.
科隆周五在杰克逊接受采访时，似乎仍对那一年全国的关注焦点集中在得克萨斯州民主党参议员候选人贝托·奥罗克身上感到恼火，这迫使埃斯皮不得不花费大部分时间去寻找资金和关注度。
Mr. Colom, in an interview in Jackson on Friday, seemed still irked that the national fixation that year was on Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, forcing Mr. Espy to spend most of his time hunting for money and attention.
“选民基础在那里，”科隆说。“他只是没有足够的时间去竞选。”五年后，白人民粹主义民主党人、猫王埃尔维斯·普雷斯利的远房表亲布兰登·普雷斯利，在2023年的州长选举中将埃斯皮的败选差距缩小了一半，仅以略多于4个百分点之差落败。甚至在那场竞选之前，普雷斯利、科隆和其他密西西比州民主党人就会在哥伦布或图佩洛共进午餐，仔细研究数据。
“The electorate was there,” Mr. Colom said. “He just didn’t get to campaign enough.”Five years later, Brandon Presley, a white populist Democrat and second cousin of Elvis Presley, cut Mr. Espy’s margin in half when he lost by a little more than four percentage points in the 2023 governor’s race. Even before that race, Mr. Presley said, he, Mr. Colom and other Mississippi Democrats would meet for lunch in Columbus or Tupelo to pore over the data.
一个由数十万选民支持科隆的空前联盟，已让密西西比州站在了创造历史的边缘。
“数据摆在那里，”他说，“但没有资金，没有基础设施，人们已经有点放弃了。”
An unparalleled coalition of hundreds of thousands of voters supporting Mr. Colom has put Mississippi on the cusp of history. “The numbers were there,” he said.
科尔姆是一位女法官和知名律师的儿子，这位律师曾在罗纳德·里根的过渡团队任职。他通过法院系统进入政界，成为密西西比州东部“黄金三角”地区的地方检察官。2025年宣布竞选参议员时，他已经是一位训练有素的筹款人和竞选者，曾击败一位担任该职位近30年的白人地方检察官。
“But there was no money, no infrastructure, and people had just kind of given up. “Mr. Colom, the son of a female judge and prominent lawyer who served on Ronald Reagan’s transition team, entered politics through the courthouse, becoming the district attorney in the Golden Triangle region in eastern Mississippi. When he announced his candidacy for the Senate in 2025, he was already a disciplined fund-raiser and campaigner, having defeated a white district attorney who had held the post for nearly 30 years.
“我懂得如何构建论点，”上个月在杰克逊市敲门拉票后他说，“我懂得如何起诉这个案子。”他针对海德-史密斯在该州曝光度低，举办了一系列“辛迪在哪里？”市政厅会议进行抨击。他在小城镇市政厅外摆摊卖吃的，并在竞选最后几天走进特朗普集会的排队人群中拉票。
“I knew how to build an argument,” he said last month after knocking doors in Jackson. “I knew how to prosecute the case.”He pilloried Ms. Hyde-Smith about her low profile in the state with a series of “Where’s Cindy?” town halls. He set up a food truck outside small-town city halls and walked the line of attendees at a Trump rally in the final days of the campaign.
正如全国大部分地区一样，特朗普总统的执政记录导致该州保守派阵营也出现不满：农民因伊朗战争和关税带来的成本而承压，工薪阶层因《平价医疗法案》下获得的医保补贴被削减而愤怒，郊区居民则因数据中心开发而处于反抗状态。
As in much of the country, President Trump’s record had led to frustrations even in conservative corners of the state: farmers were straining under costs from the Iran war and tariffs, working-class people were furious about cuts to health insurance subsidies they received through the Affordable Care Act, and suburbanites were in revolt over data center development.
60岁的克里斯·库克是德索托县的一名财务顾问，该县是密西西比三角洲与孟菲斯郊区的交汇处。他和一位朋友共进午餐——炸鸡、土豆泥和蔬菜——会见了科尔姆。库克曾支持特朗普，但他说，“必须有一些制衡”，因为在他看来总统“权力醉心”。午餐后，他相当确信会支持科尔姆。他的朋友、来自密西西比州沃尔斯的马克·怀恩斯也投了特朗普的票，但对海德-史密斯反对公布爱泼斯坦档案、拒绝回答提问感到恼火。
Chris Cook, 60, a financial adviser in DeSoto County, where the Mississippi Delta merges into the Memphis suburbs, met Mr. Colom with a friend over a lunch of chicken, mashed potatoes and vegetables. Mr. Cook had backed Mr. Trump, but, he said, “there’s got to be some checks and balances” for a president he saw as “punch-drunk on power.”He left the lunch fairly convinced he would support Mr. Colom. His friend, Mark Vines of Walls, Miss., also voted for Mr. Trump but had grown irked by Ms. Hyde-Smith’s opposition to releasing the Epstein files and her refusal to take questions.
“到了那个地步，你会超越你的队服，”甚至为科尔姆拍摄过竞选广告的怀恩斯说。
“At that point, you look past your jersey,” said Mr. Vines, who even filmed a campaign ad for Mr. Colom.
周二，科隆姆翻转了德索托县，该县较2024年的投票结果向左倾斜了30个百分点。在首府杰克逊郊外，他还翻转了麦迪逊县及其郊区，该地区曾因杰克逊学校废除种族隔离而引发的“白人外逃”而闻名。在该州东南部的松木带地区，他翻转了福雷斯特县，该县以一位邦联将军兼三K党领袖命名，至今仍以保守著称。
On Tuesday, Mr. Colom flipped DeSoto County, which shifted 30 percentage points to the left of its vote in 2024. Just outside the capital of Jackson, he also flipped Madison County and its suburbs, once known for the white flight that began with the desegregation of Jackson’s schools. And in the state’s southeastern Pine Belt, he flipped Forrest County, named after a confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, and still largely conservative.
科隆姆通过法院系统步入政坛，曾担任东密西西比“黄金三角”地区的地方检察官。
Mr. Colom entered politics through the courthouse, becoming the district attorney in the Golden Triangle region in eastern Mississippi.
“科隆姆动员了核心民主党选民，甚至略微扩大了这一基础，”密西西比州资深民主党策略师杰雷·纳什表示，并补充说，科隆姆还赢得了那些在选票下方投给共和党现任官员的共和党选民的支持。纳什说，这“前所未闻”。
“Colom turned out the core Democratic vote and even increased it a little bit,” said Jere Nash, a veteran Democratic strategist in Mississippi, adding that Mr. Colom also won over Republicans who voted for G.O.P. incumbents lower on the ballot. That, Mr. Nash said, “is unheard of.”
除了名字之外，福雷斯特县还因南密西西比大学而闻名，该校为科隆姆竞选团队提供了一项此前未被开发的资源——大学生。
Aside from its name, Forrest County is also known for the University of Southern Mississippi, which supplied a previously untapped resource for the Colom campaign, college students.
年轻人不太可能在电视上看到政治广告，因此他开始制作社交媒体视频。晚期发布的视频引起了全国关注，例如他的“换种蛋白质”讽刺短片，以及他对密西西比背景电影《罪人》的改编演绎。但他表示，早在那些视频之前，他就知道自己的策略奏效了，“因为我去各地时，年轻人会认出我。”对一些学生来说，这次选举是重塑密西西比形象的机会。
Young people were unlikely to see political ads on television, so he started making videos for social media. Late posts drew national attention, such as his “Pick another protein” gibe and his spin on the Mississippi-based movie“Sinners.”But long before those, he said, he knew his gambits were working “because I was going places and younger people would notice it.”For some students, the election was a chance to reshape the image of Mississippi.
“密西西比只需要改变，”图加洛学院（位于杰克逊的一所历史悠久的黑人大学）大四学生阿兹尼·韦尔奇林（21岁）说。最终结果距离揭晓仍有数天，韦尔奇林期盼的改变依然悬而未决。
“Mississippi just needs to change,” said Aznii Welchlin, 21, a senior at Tougaloo College, a historically Black college in Jackson. With the final call still days away, the change Ms. Welchlin wants is still on hold.
刘易斯女士表示，与那些学生以及很久以前的她父亲不同，她并不关心政治，尽管她珍视钱尼的“正义愿景”。但她知道父亲会如何回应这一时刻。
Unlike the students and her father long before them, Ms. Lewis said she was not political, though she cherished Mr. Chaney’s “vision of justice.”She did know how her father would have responded to this moment.
“即使斯科特·科洛姆获胜，”刘易斯女士说，“我认为投票结束的第二天，我父亲会像往常一样早起，然后说：好啦，咱们回去干活吧。”如果获胜，科洛姆先生将接任希拉姆·雷维尔斯曾担任的席位，雷维尔斯是美国首位黑人参议员，于1870年当选。
“Even if Scott Colom wins,” Ms. Lewis said, “I think the day after the voting, my dad would have gotten up the next morning and said: OK. Let’s get back to work.”If he wins, Mr. Colom will take the seat once held by Hiram Revels, the nation’s first Black senator, who was elected in 1870.