Black voters backed Colom by 95 points, Voter Poll found

White voters’ GOP margin fell from 65 points to 44 points

The Voter Poll by SSRS, a survey of midterm voters, found that Black voters in Mississippi — just under one-third of the state electorate — backed Democrat Scott Colom over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by 95 percentage points, 97% to 2%. That was an improvement for Democrats compared with the 2024 presidential election, when Black voters supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over Trump by 65 points. White voters also shifted: they had voted Republican in the last presidential race by 65 points but backed Hyde-Smith this year by 44 points, The Voter Poll found.

Voter frustration with the economy was a focus of the successful midterm campaign messaging from Democratic candidates, including Colom. One ad picked up on Hyde-Smith’s comments from a February interview in which she said, “You have so many proteins to choose from” when asked about high beef prices. Colom’s campaign mocked that line in a video that went viral on social media: “Pick another protein…. I’d rather pick another senator instead.” The interview answer was a major misstep for Hyde-Smith, said Gil Carter, a faculty member at Mississippi State who studies political communication. “There really couldn’t have been a worse way to respond,” he said. “That was the biggest sword she handed him.”

The poll margins sat alongside a win the Associated Press called early Wednesday evening, more than a week after Election Day. With 99% of the vote counted, Colom had 49.2%, to 48.7% for Hyde-Smith. The Associated Press said Scott Colom won a long-shot bid to oust Mississippi’s Republican incumbent senator, part of a powerful blue wave that propelled Democratic candidates to victory across the country in the midterm elections.

Colom, a local prosecutor, is the first Democrat that Mississippi has elected to the Senate since 1982 and the first Black senator from the state since the Reconstruction Era. The result of the race marks a reversal for Mississippi, which has been deep red for decades. The state has voted for a Republican presidential candidate in every election since the 1980s, and Trump won the state by 23 points in 2024. The state has been home to prominent conservatives including former Gov. Haley Barbour and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. The victory over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith was a sign of how voter disenchantment with President Trump and his party had extended to unlikely corners of the country, given Mississippi’s deeply conservative leanings, The Wall Street Journal reported. Democrats have flipped seven other Senate seats in this year’s midterm elections, giving them a majority. The party also recaptured control of the House.

The race carried an undertone of personal drama, as Hyde-Smith had blocked Colom’s nomination to a federal judgeship — a lifetime appointment — when then-President Joe Biden tried to place him on the bench in 2023. Colom later said it was unlikely that he would have left the federal judiciary to run for the Senate.

Mississippi has the largest percentage of Black voters of any state, and Democrats were hoping that Colom could capitalize on anger at Supreme Court decisions scaling back legal protections for minority voters. But the Democrats’ main Senate super PAC only started spending money in the state in recent weeks.

Hyde-Smith, a former state senator and state agriculture commissioner, had been appointed to the Senate in 2018, then later that year was elected to serve the remaining two years of an unexpired term. She won a full term in 2020.

Mississippi was one of two Senate seats that had remained uncalled for more than a week after Election Day. A winner has yet to be declared in Alaska’s Senate race, where Democrat Mary Peltola now leads GOP incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan.