Overview:
Three years after Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked his nomination to the federal bench, Scott Colom defeated her in a historic Senate election. His victory marks a milestone for Mississippi and Black political representation.
For more than a century, Mississippi has symbolized the nation’s bitter struggle over race, justice and political power. Emmett Till was lynched there. Medgar Evers was assassinated there. And generations of Black Mississippians risked their lives for the right to cast a ballot.
Now, in a stunning reversal of history, Mississippians elected a Black man to represent them in the U.S. Senate.
LEARN MORE: Black Voters Make History, Deliver Stunning Rebuke to Trump
In a state that President Donald Trump carried by 23 percentage points in 2024, Democrat Scott Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney, defeated Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican incumbent, by a razor-thin margin. He became Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction — and the first ever elected by popular statewide vote.
Black Political Power
The Associated Press called the race Wednesday, after election officials spent more than a week counting outstanding ballots. With 99% of precincts reporting, Colom led Hyde-Smith 49.2% to 48.7%, a margin of just 4,645 votes, Mississippi Today reported.
Colom’s extraordinary victory also marked an unprecedented expansion of Black political power.
This midterm election propelled an impressive number of Black candidates into statewide offices — including the nation’s first Black woman governor. And it put Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a Black man from Brooklyn, on the brink of becoming the nation’s first Black House Speaker.
Mirroring national trends, Black voters surged to the polls to support Colom. His win appears to have depended on a combination of strong Black turnout and just enough white support to overcome Mississippi’s deeply entrenched racial voting patterns.
According to data from The New York Times, 9 in 10 Black voters chose Colom, compared to just 25% of white voters. His share of white voters, however, is more than double what former President Barack Obama received in 2008.
Colom’s victory is part of an unprecedented expansion of Black political power, including the nation’s first Black woman governor and possibly its first Black House Speaker.
Flipping Mississippi from deep red to sky blue is an unexpected capstone for Democrats, but a Black man representing the state in the Senate seemed hard to imagine even a decade ago. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Americans in the Deep South briefly gained a foothold in national government in the late 1800s before political chicanery, white supremacist terror campaigns and Jim Crow laws denied them their seats.
And Mississippi — where Black voters were harassed, threatened, and sometimes killed — was its epicenter.
The Weight of History
In recent decades, other Black candidates have challenged Mississippi’s seemingly intractable power structure but fell short.
Erik Fleming, a state representative, won 38% of the vote but lost to incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran in 2008. Mike Espy, former agriculture secretary during the Clinton administration, came closer, losing to Hyde-Smith in a 2018 runoff before winning 44.1% of the vote in their 2020 rematch. In 2024, Ty Pinkins won 37.2% of the vote against incumbent Sen. Roger Wicker.
Because white Republicans have dominated Southern politics for so long, Collin’s own party doubted a Democrat, let alone a Black one, could win in arguably the nation’s most conservative state. Seen as a long shot, Colom got few resources from his party’s leaders, but years of grassroots organizing — particularly among Black voters — helped him crack the GOP stronghold.
His win also carried a particularly sharp irony.
Three years ago, Hyde-Smith blocked President Joe Biden’s nomination of Colom to a federal judgeship. She cited concerns about his record, including his position on transgender rights and support from donors associated with billionaire George Soros, a frequent donor to Democratic campaigns and a GOP bogeyman.
Now, the man Hyde-Smith denied a seat on the federal bench will take her seat in the Senate.
Colom’s victory carries enormous significance in a state where white supremacy after the Civil War was enforced through violence, intimidation and laws that kept Black citizens powerless. Indeed, five of the civil rights era’s most infamous murders occurred in the Magnolia State.
In 1955, Till, a 14-year-old schoolboy, was kidnapped, tortured and brutally murdered after being accused of offending a white woman. Eight years later, Evers — a World War II veteran who served at Normandy — was shot to death outside his Jackson home. The civil rights leader had spent years battling segregation and helping Black Mississippians register to vote.
And in 1964, the Ku Klux Klan murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner for participating in Black voter registration drives.
The state’s last Black senators, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, served during Reconstruction, when state legislators chose senators, not voters.
‘A Betrayed Cause’
More than 150 years later, Colom has broken that barrier through the ballot box. He campaigned across all 82 Mississippi counties, focusing on rising prices, struggling farmers and working families. In the run-up to the election, when analysts declared the race a dead heat, Colom said his campaign disproved the political narrative about his home state.
“The reality is, Mississippi has never been a lost cause,” he told NPR before the election. “We’ve been a betrayed cause.”
His hard-fought, narrow victory suggests Mississippi’s political arithmetic, where Black residents account for nearly 40% of the population, may finally be changing.
Five Black governors will serve simultaneously, including Georgia’s Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black woman elected governor in American history. Wisconsin elected David Crowley, Nevada elected Aaron Ford, Maryland reelected Wes Moore and Florida elected Republican Byron Donalds. All are the first Black governors of their respective states.
In the Senate, Illinois Senator-elect Juliana Stratton will join fellow Democrats Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware. For the first time, three Black women will serve together in the chamber.
LEARN MORE: Hakeem Jeffries is Set to Make History. The Far Left is in His Way.
And in the House of Representatives, Jeffries is likely to become the first Black Speaker, placing an African American second in the presidential line of succession.
For Colom, the history was never far from the campaign.
In one of his final advertisements, he stood outside Evers’ former home in Jackson, recounting the civil rights leader’s sacrifice and urging Mississippians to exercise the right Evers died to ensure.
“He was killed for helping Mississippians vote,” Colom said. “On Tuesday, use your vote and honor everyone who died for that right.”
