Mississippi turning? Democrats point to Republican ‘panic’ as Donald Trump flies in

It’s 3pm so the staff in Borroum’s Drug Store are sweeping the floor and wiping the counters. Closing time here has been midafternoon since the 1920s but on this Monday, the town is deserted anyway. Everyone has gone out as far as the Crossroads Arena, on the east edge of the town, to wait for Donald Trump. Well, most people have.

“I’m not,” Lesley Lancaster says decisively when asked whether she will be going to the presidential rally.

“No. I don’t like crowds. I’m not waiting in line for nothing. I don’t have patience. But I think there’s a tonne of people out there. We are like five minutes from the Tennessee state line too. I was wondering why he chose Corinth out of all of Mississippi. But this was the crossroads for the civil war. Those train tracks I’m sure you crossed over: that was the front line.”

Lancaster is the latest in a line of Borroums and Mitchells who have operated the pharmacy here since AJ Borroum, a surgeon in the civil war, stopped off in Corinth while making his way back from Atlanta to Oxford in 1865. “A doctor buddy of his persuaded him to open a drugstore,” she says. Now, it has distinguished itself as the oldest drugstore in Mississippi and as a casually dazzling emporium of family artefact and authentic, unfussy Americana, with the pharmacy at the rear of the store, the original soda fountain with counter and swing stools as the centrepiece and, framed on the walls, weaponry and civil war paraphernalia passed from AJ Borroum through the generations. Family portraitures decorate the walls and, over the dining tables, an array of glass cases containing Native American arrowheads that another ancestor acquired in his youth.

“People who know about these things come in,” Lancaster says, “and they’ll say: ‘I know what case I would take.’ A lot of history here. But it’s just family stuff to us.”

Her father, Alexis, is the owner of Borroums now.

“But he goes by Lex,” she says, explaining, in an undiluted Mississippi accent, the thread of people named Alexis running through her family line.

“My brother’s name is Alexis and he goes by Lex. I named her Alexis,” she says, pointing to her daughter, who is helping in the store – “and she goes by Lex. And I have a Luke, too.”

The past is never dead: it’s a Mississippi phrase and a Mississippi truism. Corinth locals learned the president would be visiting with them just four days before the event itself. The fire service had to devise a lightning-fast management plan for traffic and people. The last president to speak in Corinth was Franklin Roosevelt, who addressed a crowd in November 1934 to praise the people of Alcorn country for embracing “an experiment that is going to succeed- the Alcorn Country Electric Power Association”.

Corinth is the biggest town in Alcorn county, which voted for Trump by 83 per cent, to 15 per cent for Kamala Harris in 2024. Trump won the state of Mississippi by a whopping 23 points. Although Republican alarm bells have been ringing for weeks in traditional strongholds of Iowa, Kansas and Ohio, where toss-up senate races are deadlocked, Mississippi was, until recently, regarded as inviolable. But Scott Colom’s campaign to unseat Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith has attracted conspicuous campaigners, including Harris, who appeared last week and Pete Buttigieg, scheduled to rally with Colom on Tuesday evening in Biloxi.

Colom would, if elected, become Mississippi’s first African-American senator since Blanche Bruce, who served one term after being elected in 1875. No Mississippi Democrat has won a senate seat since 1982. But the party has begun to invest in Colom’s campaign, buoyed by the national resurgence in red strongholds and the hunch that Colom’s recognition as a district attorney could tap into both the state’s significant black demographic of 36 per cent and the national disillusionment at spiralling fuel and grocery prices. Still, actually winning would represent a stunning result. Sharon Peters, a staff member in Borroum’s, explains what Trump means to her after the last of the close-down chores are completed.

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“I look at what I grew up with – we used to be strong internationally, and among ourselves. And we hadn’t been there for many years – until this guy came along. And he is having to undo a lot of things that should have been addressed many years ago. He is not a polished politician, at all. He can be crude. But I would call it forthright. As a person it doesn’t bother me, but it is very offensive to other people. He is burning all of that to the ground.”

The late decision to add Mississippi to Trump’s daily blitz of rallies was quickly interpreted as another sign of Republican panic over the library of polling data suggesting that a catastrophic midterm night is coming down the tracks. Even so, Scott Colom trails Hyde-Smith by an average of six points in most of the polling. Mississippi remains new-Republican heartland and this county, nestled just south of Tennessee and a half-hour west of the Alabama state line, seems like alien territory for any Democratic aspirant.

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“Well, Mississippi is a red state,” Shane Eaten says with a shrug when I ask him why Trump is so popular here.

“Most people vote Republican here. I just don’t see how the other side, the Democrats, most people around here just don’t line up with them. This area is conservative, Christian, this whole area’s called the Bible Belt, of course.”

He has driven across from Booneville, about a half-hour west in Alabama. He’d left his mobile phone in the car and was retrieving it while his daughter stood in line. We stand on the hill beside the arena surveying the drift of people snaking hundreds of metres back in the warm afternoon. They had begun arriving at nine in the morning. For weeks, Trump’s rallies had attracted lacklustre crowds, but this scene seemed like a return to the evangelism of 2024. Nothing the Democrats have offered, Eaten says, even since the last election, has resonated with his vision for the United States.

“I feel like Trump is for America. Like he says: make America great again. I believe that. I know the war in Iran is costing us money but I believe that will be under control after the election. It may take a little while, but he will get prices down with the pipeline they just signed for. But, you know, I build houses for a living. Last time Trump was president, it was booming. Work was everywhere. When Biden got in, everything stopped. Of course, the pandemic had a lot to do with that, I do accept that. But yeah, everything got slower and it hadn’t improved a whole bunch.”

Nearby, Mary Barrett is sitting on the grass bank with her friend. They’ve persuaded family to stand in line too. She, too, is adamant the Democratic message has made absolutely no impression on her political leanings.

“I don’t want to see all the things the Democrats are putting across myself. The last 10 years almost makes you afraid of what this world is coming to. Trump stands for all the things I want to see. I want to see my grandchildren have the freedom of speech and the freedom to do what’s right. And I feel that has been curtailed. Before Biden got out, I even thought about keeping extra food in our house. I have started locking our doors – we never did that before.”

She shakes her head when asked whether she’d always been Republican.

“No, in fact my parents were Democrats. We were all Democrats, to be honest, until what they’ve gone to today – gone woke, gone anti-police, gone anti-Ice. We don’t want the foreigners here if they are not here legally. They are not like my daddy’s Democrats. And my daddy was a true, hard Democrat.”

The Republican rap against Colom, and the other Democratic contenders threatening to flip red states, is that they are the antithesis of those old values. Mississippi television adverts portray Colom as a big-donor beneficiary and align him with the transgender fearmongering that has been a central element of the Trump second-term manifesto. “They call him the transgender defender,” runs one attack advert airing on repeat. “Colom bragged: ‘you can’t run to the left of me.’ Believe him. Mississippi’s better choice: Cindy Hyde Smith for US Senate.’

But strolling through the fringes of the Trump crowd outside the Crossroads arena on Monday was Colom himself, shaking hands and speaking with people waiting to get in. Later, he would describe Trump’s impromptu visit as “a sign of our momentum and of how desperate he is. I think this is the best proof of it: the president of the United States, in Corinth, Mississippi, eight days before an election.’”

And there is something faintly surreal about the descent, over the afternoon, of secret service security lockdown on sedate rabbit runs such as Levee Road and Bell School Road around the arena. Residents stick hastily crafted parking signs, ranging from $10 to $30 on their front lawns. Neighbours stand around talking, shading their eyes as they scan the sky for any sighting of the presidential aircraft. Locals line the roadside at the cafes and petrol stations to catch the presidential cavalcade as it moves past them in a blur of blue lighting and black limousine sheen. The entire event is a diversion: no ordinary Monday evening.

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Joe’s Shoes, on Filmore Street, looks out on to the green and the Corinth tourism office. “You can tell everyone’s already headed out there,” says Tracy Tomlinson, who is at the front desk.

“Everybody’s gotten real excited about it.”

She has already phoned Chris Latch, whose father, Joe, eventually bought the store from Joe Blankenship after starting work there at the age of 14. Latch arrives in to offer his welcomes and a quick history of the evolution of the store. “My father’s family grew up poor sharecroppers, things like that. But yeah, he worked here all his life and then he eventually bought it.”

Tomlinson jokes that they are trying to nudge Joe towards social media but the retention of the old cash register and written receipt books is part of an observance of local custom. Borroum’s offers similar touches, such as store credit and free delivery. We talk about business and how the tariff upheaval as gradually made its presence felt along Filmore Street.

“Oh yeah. We see it on a lot of our inventory,” says Latch.

“Just prices. It’s kind of like how they say you boil a frog a little bit at a time. And prices just inching up and it makes it difficult on people. So yeah, fuel, groceries – the things that people have to have.”

It’s the national complaint against which Trump has been attempting to defend himself over the course of an extraordinary midterm cycle in which he has stubbornly presented himself, in defiance of historically low personal approval ratings, as the surrogate candidate on the ballot.

By six o’clock, downtown Corinth is stunningly peaceful: the only sound to be heard near the railway crossing is of the water fountain feature. It moves to its own self-assured time and even the arrival of the sitting president, who has begun to speak in the big arena just outside town, cannot alter that rhythm.

A man in a pickup driving past the railway tracks slows down and rolls his window after seeing the camera.

“You railroaders?” he asks and then nods at the mention of the Trump rally. He tells us he couldn’t get off work to go. Like most people in Corinth, he’s effusive in his welcome.

“I hope you enjoy our town,” he calls as he pushes the truck into gear.

Twilight falls quickly and out by the arena, people who didn’t get into the event are walking back across the overpass, headed for their parked cars and home as below them, the traffic shoots by on the busy US 45 to Tupelo.