By Jordan Ellis, Miami Media Group
Scott Colom celebrated his U.S. Senate victory at Tougaloo College, a historically Black institution that gave civil rights organizers a place to gather when challenging Mississippi’s racial order could cost them their jobs or their lives. On Wednesday night, Colom invoked Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer as he addressed supporters. The district attorney had just defeated Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, becoming the first Black Mississippian elected to the U.S. Senate by a statewide popular vote.
The Associated Press called the race eight days after Election Day. With an estimated 99% of votes counted, Colom had 49.2% to Hyde-Smith’s 48.7%, with independent Ty Pinkins taking 2.1%. Two years earlier, President Donald Trump carried Mississippi by 23 percentage points. Colom became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in the state since John Stennis in 1982.
The power of voters who are easy to overlook
Mississippi sent two Black men to the Senate during Reconstruction. State lawmakers chose Hiram Revels, who took office in 1870 and became the first Black member of Congress. They later elected Blanche K. Bruce, who was born into slavery and served a full Senate term from 1875 to 1881. When Colom takes office, he will be the first Black senator from Mississippi in 145 years. The distinction that voters chose him directly gives the victory particular weight in a state where Black citizens spent generations fighting to exercise that right.
The Mississippi Delta helped decide the race. An Axios analysis of AP county returns found Colom ahead in 16 of the 18 counties in the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area, with an advantage of roughly 38,000 votes across those counties. That included Sunflower County, where Hamer challenged barriers to Black voter registration. Democrat Mike Espy had already carried 15 of those counties in 2020. Colom built on that support, expanding the Democratic margin in a region whose votes mattered far beyond its borders.
The count itself carried a lesson. Colom led by just 43 votes after the last election-night update. His advantage grew as counties reviewed provisional ballots and reported additional results. In Republican-leaning Jackson County, Colom narrowly won the batch of votes that prompted the AP to call the race. For voters accustomed to hearing that their state’s outcome is a foregone conclusion, Mississippi offered a concrete reminder of how much can depend on a few thousand people and the time it takes to count their ballots.
What Washington can learn from Mississippi
Colom’s win came in a midterm election that gave Democrats control of both chambers of Congress. Trump campaigned for Hyde-Smith in Mississippi in the closing days, asking voters to send her back to Washington to help advance his agenda. The result showed how much the political ground could shift even in a state he had recently carried by a wide margin. Mississippi’s 2027 statewide elections will offer an early test of whether Democrats can sustain the coalition that elected Colom.
For South Florida, where statewide election maps can also make communities feel politically overlooked, the Delta returns are worth a closer look. Those counties had backed a Democratic Senate candidate before. This time, a larger margin there helped change who would represent the entire state. That is a reason for national parties to pay attention to communities they already count on, even in states they rarely expect to win.
Now Colom will have to turn a narrow electoral victory into a record that voters can judge. Mississippi families will be able to ask what he did to keep health care within reach, bring investment to communities that have struggled to attract it and protect access to the ballot. The people who sent him to Washington have earned the right to ask those questions, and they will get to weigh his answers at the polls.