Mississippi elects Democrat Scott Colom as state’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction

Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Scott Colom, right, talks with owner Maati Jone Primm during a campaign stop at Marshall's Music and Book Store, which is recognized as the oldest Black-owned bookstore in the U.S., Friday, Nov. 6, 2026, in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

JACKSON, Miss. -- Democratic nominee Scott Colom defeated Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith on Wednesday in Mississippi’s closely contested U.S. Senate race after a prolonged ballot counting process, giving the state its first Black U.S. senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Colom’s narrow victory is a seismic shift in Mississippi, which has been controlled mostly by white conservatives for generations despite having the largest share of Black residents of any U.S. state. The outcome adds to a decisive midterm rebuke of U.S. President Donald Trump, whose party suffered defeats in several Republican-controlled states, and it will bolster some Democrats’ argument that their future runs through the American South.

“All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” Colom told a crowd of hundreds who gathered at Tougaloo College for his victory party. “I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we can show the country that Mississippi matters.”

The Associated Press called the race in Colom’s favor after local officials spent several days processing absentee and provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots in Mississippi.

The last time Mississippi chose a new Democratic senator was 1947; the winner was a staunch segregationist. Colom, a 43-year-old local prosecutor, capitalized on the state’s large Black population, discontent with the economy and Hyde-Smith’s missteps as she sought a second full term.

“They actually deserve a senator that will listen to them, that actually cares about what they think, actually cares about what they’re going through,” Colom said in the campaign’s closing stretch.

Hyde-Smith, 67, called Colom late Wednesday afternoon to concede and released a concession speech online shortly afterward.

“While this is not the outcome we worked for or hoped for, I respect the decision of Mississippi voters,” Hyde-Smith said. “I want to congratulate Scott Colom and wish him well as he takes on the tremendous responsibility of representing our great state.”

Colom said during the campaign that he could represent all of Mississippi, a state where racial divisions have long defined its politics and society, and he repeated that pledge after his victory.

“My commitment to you, each and every one of you, is that first I’m going to treat your children like I want my children to be treated,” Colom said. “I’m going to treat your parents the way I want my parents to be treated. I’m gonna treat your future the way I want my future to be” and “work to make every Mississippian’s life better.”

National Democrats, activists and Mississippians celebrate

Party leaders hailed the senator-elect’s triumph, with nods to the South’s emerging status as a political battleground after other victories from North Carolina and South Carolina to Georgia and Texas.

“Scott ran the campaign of a lifetime and re-imagined what’s possible for Democrats in the South,” Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer of New York posted online.

Former president Bill Clinton, a native Arkansan who campaigned with Colom days before the election, addressed the senator-elect on social media, saying he won “because you believe in the promise of your state’s people. And they believed in you right back.”

Vera Finley was among those supporters.

“I am here to celebrate my parents and my grandparents. I am not one generation out of the cotton fields,” Finley said ahead of Colom’s victory speech. “Both of my parents picked cotton. And my great-grandmother was sold here as a slave from Virginia to here. So I am so excited to be on this side of history.”

Another Mississippian, NAACP President Derrick Johnson, issued a statement saying the state’s voters, most notably Black voters, “made history because they refused to be intimidated, discouraged, or counted out” in a state that has seen “some of the nation’s most difficult battles for voting rights.”

A race Washington once viewed as a long shot

The contest was a latecomer to the national spotlight, finally drawing attention and money months after Black senators, including Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks, first urged donors and party leaders to see it as winnable.

The son of a onetime Republican who worked for president Ronald Reagan, Colom produced one of the year’s most widely circulated ads. After Hyde-Smith seemed to brush off high beef prices by saying consumers could choose other proteins, Colom cut a 30-second spot depicting incredulous voters saying they’d “pick another senator instead.”

When Trump came to Corinth, Mississippi, in late October to rally with Hyde-Smith, Colom walked the line of Trump supporters as they waited to enter. He introduced himself and asked about their concerns.

Later, when Trump called Hyde-Smith to the stage, she said only nine words in six seconds before stepping away: “Is this not the best president in our lifetime?”

Colom’s appearance outside the rally tracked his strategy of criticizing Trump’s policies -- especially the Iran war that drove up gas prices and tariffs that caused headaches for Mississippi farmers -- without taking personal jabs at the president or people who voted for him. Instead, he consistently put the onus on Hyde-Smith, framing her as a nonentity in Washington -- a critique that resonated in a state accustomed to long-serving, powerful senators.

There is some irony in Hyde-Smith losing to Colom. In 2022, president Joe Biden nominated Colom to be a U.S. District Court judge. Mississippi’s senior Republican Sen. Roger Wicker and former Gov. Haley Barbour, who is also a former national Republican chairman, backed the nomination.

Hyde-Smith, however, blocked Colom’s confirmation. Colom said his campaign was never about getting even with Hyde-Smith.

Colom called on Mississippi’s history

The senator-elect concluded his campaign with an ad that featured him at the Jackson home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who, in 1963, was gunned down in his driveway by a white supremacist.

Colom told the story of Evers’ military service at Normandy in World War II, his voter registration efforts in Mississippi, his assassination and the three decades it took to win a conviction. “He was killed for helping Mississippians vote,” Colom said. “On Tuesday, use your vote and honour everyone who died for that right.”

At the lectern Wednesday night, Colom said it was appropriate that the race be called on Veterans Day, as he again paid tribute to Evers.

“He served his country, came home to Mississippi, and they wouldn’t let him vote,” Colom said. “But he had faith that Mississippi could make progress.”

Despite Republicans’ domination, the path was always there

Because of the Black population and its alignment with Democrats, Mississippi’s general elections have been closer for years than its Southern neighbors. Trump won by double digits in each of his three presidential contests, but in 2023, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves managed to win reelection by a margin of just 3 percentage points.

Colom and other Black party leaders and strategists insisted throughout 2026 that he could narrow the gap with strong Black turnout, Republican discontent and an uptick in Democrats’ usual share of the white vote in Mississippi.

Results showed strong turnout in the Mississippi Delta and its concentration of majority Black counties. But nearly all of the state moved leftward from the 2024 election, when Trump carried Mississippi by nearly 23 points.

Hyde-Smith was appointed to the Senate in 2018. She won a special election runoff in 2018 and a full term in 2020. Both times she defeated Democrat Mike Espy, a former U.S. agriculture secretary who’d also been Mississippi’s first Black congressman since Reconstruction.

During the extended vote count, Colom acknowledged the historic nature of his candidacy but said he cares more about what it means for others.

“My job is to do well enough as the next United States senator that the next time some young Black boy or girl has the work ethic, the vision and the values,” he said, “and they want to be United States senator, that nobody says because of anything I’ve done that they shouldn’t get a chance.”

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By Bill Barrow and Sophie Bates, The Associated Press

Barrow reported from Atlanta and Washington.