Well, it took a week, but Scott Colom was declared the winner of the Senate race in Mississippi. Scott Colom is a Democrat. Scott Colom is Black. And this is still Mississippi.
CNN first made the call Wednesday afternoon that Colom had defeated Republican senator and living Confederate monument Cindy Hyde-Smith or, as Colom called her during the campaign, “Cindy High Prices.” That 1990s-era hip-hop-inspired sobriquet was one of many pointed barbs at the senator’s clueless response to the state’s economic conditions, which are bad even by Mississippi standards. Donald Trump tanked the economy and Cindy High Prices suggested that if her constituents couldn’t afford beef, they could pick another protein. Instead, they picked another senator. (Watch Colom’s classic viral ad below.)
Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney from Columbus, Mississippi, will become the first Black person elected to statewide office in Mississippi since Reconstruction. Mississippi’s last Black senator, Blanche Kelso Bruce, was born enslaved, and the state’s last Democratic senator, John C. Stennis, was a hardcore racial segregationist, who opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. He signed 1956’s Southern Manifesto that opposed racial integration in public places and embraced the filibuster as a vital tool in blocking civil rights legislation. His official Senate photo looks like someone had gone back in time and told him that Scott Colom was just elected senator from Mississippi.
Like Colom, Stennis was a prosecutor but a horribly corrupt one: He pursued the conviction and execution of Black sharecroppers whose confessions he knew were extracted through torture. This included flogging, hanging, and strangulation. (The non-MAGA Supreme Court overturned the conviction and death sentence in the landmark Brown v. Mississippi.) Stennis was an open white supremacist who once told a colleague that Black people “had come down from the trees a lot later than we did.” He did finally renounce racial segregation in the 1980s, which probably makes him more racially progressive than Stephen Miller.
Interestingly, in 1986, Stennis did campaign on behalf of Democrat Mike Espy, who became Mississippi’s first Black U.S. representative since Reconstruction. Espy would lose to Cindy Hyde-Smith twice in 2018 and 2020.
On election night, Hyde-Smith declared victory before all the votes were counted — very Trump-like. She boasted, “I blocked Scott Colom from being a judge, and you blocked him from being a senator.” She mocked Colom for having campaigned with Kamala Harris: “And Kamala Harris learned a lesson that we may not quite enjoy her company in Mississippi. I think she learned that.”
Hyde-Smith’s gloating proved premature. She fell like her beloved Confederacy.
An easy joke about Hyde-Smith’s defeat — which I’m sure she’s handling well — is to declare that the South did not rise again, but this ignores the fact that Black people are also the South. We’re why the barbecue is so good.
Political analysts have compared Colom’s victory to a Republican winning in California, but this goes well beyond partisan politics. South Carolina, the birthplace of the Confederacy, did actually elect a Black Republican senator (that’s Tim Scott, though Dr. Annie Andrews is the senator who’s more welcome in the average Black church). Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents — close to 39 percent, but generations of Jim Crow-inspired voter suppression ensured that Black Mississippians had little practical say in their government, and their elected officials acted accordingly.
However, Senator-elect Scott Colom has awakened a sleeping giant. Black voter turnout increased significantly in 2026, especially in the South. According to Ellis Bates at Marist Poll, Kamala Harris’s vote share in 2024 outran the Black population in two out of 25 majority Black counties in Mississippi. Colom achieved this in 21 out of 25, netting 135 percent of Harris’s net votes in those counties, in a midterm election, which famously never happened in the Obama era. Colom’s almost 5,000-vote margin over Hyde-Smith wasn’t entirely due to Black voters, though. He held down her margins in rural white counties, as well.
Mississippi doesn’t make it easy for people of any race to vote. They are one of only three states without in-person early voting, which ironically might have promoted complacency among Hyde-Smith’s characteristically shiftless campaign. Republicans had no way of seeing this upset coming their way.
Soon-to-be former Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith graduated in 1977 from Lawrence County Academy, a private all-white school founded in 1970 in direct response to federal desegregation orders. The school’s 1975 yearbook featured a mascot dressed as a Confederate general waving a Confederate flag. Hyde-Smith’s daughter graduated from another segregation academy, Brookhaven, in 2017, which was during my son’s lifetime.
Hyde-Smith’s husband is cattle farmer, Mike Smith, who’s related to Noah Smith, the alleged murderer of civil rights activist and World War I veteran Lamar Smith (no relation).
In 2014, during a visit to the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library, Hyde-Smith posed for a photo while wearing a Confederate general’s hat and holding a rifle. She posted the photo on Facebook and declared, “Mississippi history at its best!” Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a white supremacist and a traitor.
During Hyde-Smith’s first Senate race, she appeared at an event with cattle rancher Colin Hutchinson and said, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” This was obviously offensive and controversial, and not just because most public hangings are general admission.
Hyde-Smith was actually a Democrat until 2010. This is not that surprising, as most ancestral Southern Democrats switched parties after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008. In 2004, Senator John Kennedy was a Louisiana Democrat who endorsed John Kerry over George W. Bush. In 2008, Kennedy was a Republican who endorsed John McCain over Barack Obama. It’s not that dissimilar from longtime Democrat Debra Messing suddenly endorsing a Republican for New York governor (that won’t be the last one, I think) or Haley Stevens endorsing Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed.
Haley Stevens’ AIPAC buddies donated significantly to Hyde-Smith’s campaign. Hyde-Smith is a bigot who promotes antisemitic conspiracies about George Soros as some sinister puppet master, but I suppose that doesn’t matter as long as she unwaveringly supports Israel’s right-wing government. (She’s also not fond of Muslims.)
As we’ll soon see dramatized in the inevitable big screen biopic, Hyde-Smith blocked Colom from becoming a federal judge in 2023 for no good reason other than petty bigotry.
“I visited with the District Attorney recently, and I recognize that he is smart and well liked in his district,” Hyde-Smith said in a statement stuffed with bullshit. “However, there are a number of concerns I have regarding his record."
Those concerns were lies: “As someone with a strong interest in protecting the rights of girls and women,” Hyde-Smith wrote. “I am concerned about Scott Colom’s opposition to legislation to protect female athletes.” Colom had never actually taken a position on the trans sports issue, but he had signed onto a letter, along with other district attorneys, that condemned the criminalization of gender-affirming surgery.
“The significant support his campaign received from George Soros also weighs heavily against his nomination in my view,” Hyde-Smith added. “I simply cannot support his nomination to serve on the federal bench in Mississippi for a lifetime.”
Soros funded a PAC that supported Colom’s election as district attorney, but he didn’t coordinate with Soros or solicit the funds, which were used for ads that he didn’t even see before they aired. Benefitting from Jewish liberal money is also not a crime nor reasonable justification to block Colom’s nomination.
Democrats controlled the Senate in 2023, but Judiciary Chair Durbin is a known chump who honored the absurd “blue slip” process that gave home state senators a veto over judicial nominees. This, of course, ensured that Black judges from states with Jim Crow judges would rarely make it to the bench. When Hyde-Smith withheld the “blue slip” for Colom, Durbin said, “I want to continue blue slips with one caveat: I won’t honor a blue slip that I believe discriminates because of race, gender, or sexual discrimination. So we’ll see how this develops.”
There was nothing to develop. Hyde-Smith’s motives were blatantly discriminatory, but Judiciary committee member Lindsey Graham played on Durbin’s chumpness. He lamented, “That standard, I don’t know how you would impose it. It takes the committee in a really dangerous place I think, for us to basically question the motives of our fellow senators and that being the reason to dishonor the blue slip.”
Durbin obviously folded and honored Hyde-Smith’s dishonorable actions. On the upside, Durbin is finally leaving the Senate, and both Hyde-Smith and Graham’s seats are now held by Democrats.
Senator-elect Scott Colom sounds pretty damn good.
Hopefully this leads to long term high black turnout in the South—really the fist time since Reconstruction that the black vote was decisive in Mississippi. (Bad as Stennis was, his colleague Eastland sounded like the head of the Klan, and he may well have been, and that’s the sort of Democrat you’d see elected there those days). The key is to make this not be a one time fluke due to Republican complacency (Hyde-Smith was a particularly bad politician of the sort you usually get when your party feels “safe” with that seat, see also Roger Marshall) and Democrats energized by Trump’s Mussolini Era. Colom is up next in 2032 and will need the black turnout on max with just enough whites happy with him and Democrats in general (he will for better or worse be tied to national Democrats, all the more reason for Schumer to step down if he gave a crap about the country rather than his own self regard).
And has any group shit itself in the foot harder than the Israel lobby? Siding with antisemites because they hate Muslims as much as you do, and losing most Jews and philosemitic non-Jews, while ALSO having Trumpers turn on you—just amazing.
Congrats to Senator-elect Scott Colom and to Mississippi.