Mississippi Gets a Senator. Who Got Left Out of the Math?

Russ Hudson, 35, an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan, ended up in a Senate campaign ad this October because his father balked at a script that required profanity. Hudson did the cussing himself. "Shee-it. I'd rather pick another senator, instead," he said, after Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith seemed to brush off high beef prices by telling people, "You have so many proteins to choose from." That line, delivered to voters squeezed at the grocery store, went viral. It may have done more work than any $7 million check.

On Wednesday, November 11, the Associated Press called Mississippi's U.S. Senate race for Democrat Scott Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney, nine days after the November 3 election and after local officials spent days processing absentee and affidavit ballots. At one point the day after the election, just a few dozen votes separated the candidates. Colom will be the first Black U.S. senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Who Has the Power

The Senate that Colom is headed to has a tradition that tells you plenty about how the apparatus works. In 2022, then-President Joe Biden nominated Colom to be a U.S. District Court judge in the Northern District of Mississippi. Sen. Roger Wicker, Rep. Bennie Thompson and former Gov. Haley Barbour backed him. Hyde-Smith blocked it anyway, using the Senate custom that hands home-state senators a virtual veto. "I simply cannot support his nomination to serve on the federal bench in Mississippi for a lifetime," she said in a 2023 statement. One person, by courtesy of a club tradition, decided who could sit on the bench.

Then there's the money. The Times reported that George and Alex Soros have supported Colom since at least 2015, and that the super PAC Fulcrum received $1 million from the Soros family's super PAC. Donor Steve Pajcic spent at least $7 million backing four red-state Democratic Senate candidates, three of whom have won. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker backed Colom financially, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer helped him raise cash. On the other side, a seven-figure, last-minute ad buy by the Senate Leadership Fund, a PAC closely tied to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., wasn't enough to save Hyde-Smith. Only about $22 million was seen on the airwaves, about 62 percent of it favoring Colom.

Who Gets Squeezed

The voters who turned this race weren't moved by party platforms. They were angry about prices. The AP said Colom assembled Black voters, white voters frustrated with high prices and the Trump administration's agenda, and some Republicans dissatisfied with Hyde-Smith's loyalty to the president. Turnout was strong in the Mississippi Delta and its majority Black counties, and nearly all of the state moved leftward from 2024, when Trump carried it by 20 to 23 points depending on the outlet. CBS News reported that the Cook Political Report moved the race from solidly Republican to leaning Republican, citing an unpopular war in Iran and persistent affordability issues.

Colom's own pitch to Republican voters was blunt. "I'm going to get you what you were promised in 2024," he told CNN, citing lower grocery prices, an end to wars and the full and transparent release of the Epstein files. He said Hyde-Smith's failing was "really the betrayal of the America First movement, right? Like she was supposed to help President Trump get lower grocery prices. Well, she betrayed us."

What They're Calling Progress

The praise arrived fast. Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand called the win historic. The AP said the result bolsters some Democrats' argument that their future runs through the South. Democrats will hold at least 55 Senate seats to Republicans' 44 in January, with Alaska still undecided. NAACP national president Derrick Johnson said, "Mississippi voters made history because they refused to be intimidated, discouraged, or counted out."

Colom himself kept the register modest. "There were times that I couldn't get donors to answer the phone," he said in his victory speech at Tougaloo College in Jackson. "I did my first town hall in Jackson, Mississippi. ... Less than 10 people showed up, but I kept the faith." Those fewer than ten people at a town hall are the real story of how anything starts: a handful of neighbors in a room, no donors, no ad buy.

Hyde-Smith conceded in a video Wednesday evening, saying her campaign "worked tirelessly to ensure every legally cast vote was counted." Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, congratulated "Senator-Elect @scott_colom." And Colom has already hinted at friction inside his own party, suggesting he might not back Schumer's bid to keep his top slot, saying his concern was that both Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries come from Brooklyn.

The seat Colom will fill was once held by Hiram Revels, elected in 1870, and Blanche K. Bruce, who served until 1881. Both were chosen by the state legislature. Colom will be the first chosen by voters. Black residents make up 37 percent of Mississippi's population, the highest of any state, yet only two Black men, Mike Espy and Rep. Bennie Thompson, have been elected to the House since Reconstruction. Forty-four years passed since Mississippi last sent a Democrat to the Senate. Voters waited, canvassed, and finally got a name on a ballot. What the Senate does with him is another matter.