Grass-roots outreach and viral ads fueled an underdog campaign national Democrats initially dismissed
Democrat Scott Colom has won Mississippi’s US Senate race, unseating incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith to become the state’s first Black senator since the Reconstruction era. Colom is the first Democrat to win a Mississippi Senate seat since 1982.
The victory marked the first unseating of an incumbent US senator in Mississippi since 1942, and it came with little help from the national Democratic Party, which put serious money into the race only in its final month. Colom assembled the coalition he said he needed, combining Black voter turnout with the support of roughly a quarter of white voters and flipping counties that had been Republican strongholds.
The result confounded the expectations that followed Colom from the moment he entered the race. Pundits largely wrote him off when he announced his campaign, and prognosticators labeled the seat “solid R” for much of the cycle — a designation Colom said made fundraising harder. Within three months of launching, he had raised about $594,000, while Hyde-Smith raised nearly $1.1 million over the same period, including a significant donation from Aipac, the pro-Israel lobbying group. Shortly before the election, Colom’s total stood at about $3.6 million against Hyde-Smith’s $5.3 million.
Many said the national turning point came with a viral campaign ad less than half a minute long. In it, Hyde-Smith, a cattle farmer, answers a reporter’s question about the rising price of beef: “You know, you have so many proteins to choose from.” The ad then cuts to a man flipping burgers on a grill. “Pick another protein?” he says. “Shhiiiiii – I’d rather pick another senator instead.” Colom’s ads leaned on Mississippi specifics throughout the race — an early spot highlighted the state’s history and progress, and a later one spoofed the hit film Sinners, which was filmed in Mississippi.
The ad extended a campaign built on showing up in person. Colom drove a “pick another protein” truck that handed out free tacos, talked with students and alumni at college homecomings, and chatted with voters waiting in line to see Donald Trump. He talked to people at Waffle Houses, chatted them up in barber shops and hair salons, and visited with employees at fast-food restaurants and big-box stores. He campaigned on the idea that “Mississippi Matters.” “I don’t do speeches,” Colom said days before the election. “I speak from my heart. I talk about what I care about, I listen to people.”
He did it with little help from the national Democratic Party. By April, Senator Warnock was telling national Democrats to pay attention to Colom’s campaign — a plea that, according to the Guardian’s reporting, was met with laughter. Only about a month before the election, after the party saw the impact of the “pick another protein” ad and Colom’s rising popularity outside the state, did it begin seriously infusing cash. National leaders including Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker stumped across Mississippi, and Colom’s momentum, which had been building for months, crescendoed further.
The Senate seat was not Colom’s first uphill race. In 2015, he unseated an incumbent who had held the 16th circuit’s district attorney seat for almost three decades, becoming the first Black district attorney for the circuit — a position in which he held a 94% success rate for convictions. In 2023, Biden nominated Colom, a seventh-generation Mississippian, to serve as a US district court judge for the northern district of Mississippi. The nomination drew support from Republicans, including Senator Roger Wicker, and from Democrats alike. Hyde-Smith blocked it.
On election day, well before the race was called, Hyde-Smith joked about that decision. “I blocked Scott Colom from being a federal judge, and you blocked him from being a US Senator,” she said.
The race’s final days played out largely without Hyde-Smith. Despite Colom maintaining a lead of several thousand votes, the incumbent refused to concede. Historic voter turnout, combined with data that inaccurately marked voters inactive, left all 82 of Mississippi’s counties counting affidavit ballots, a process that took days. Colom stayed in public view, using the national media attention to highlight local people and businesses. “I’m glad that the media is getting an opportunity to see our state,” he told reporters. “Go out to talk to some Mississippians – they’re very proud of this moment.” He encouraged journalists to visit local museums and shouted out the state’s colleges, and he used the days to thank voters.
The day after the election, Colom visited Millsaps College, his alma mater, and Tougaloo College, a historically Black college whose students have been active in the fight for voting rights. At Millsaps, he walked out to raucous cheers and focused little on the campaign, talking instead about his time at the school and the value of an education. The visit also gave him the chance to thank the professor who gave him the confidence to run for office. Colom came to Millsaps to play basketball, but Anne MacMaster, an English professor, asked him during his sophomore year to read a passage from Richard Wright, the Mississippi author of the novel Native Son. “That is the most beautiful reading of Richard Wright I’ve ever heard,” Colom recalled her saying. “You can only read that as a Mississippian that’s understood what those words actually mean.” MacMaster became his adviser and the reason he double-majored in history and English. Colom hugged her — days later, he would become Mississippi’s next senator — but the interaction had to be brief: a swarm of people waited to speak with him one-on-one.
Colom framed the win as a statement about the state itself. “[People have to] understand how much potential and promise we have in Mississippi,” he said. “We’re a state that has to matter, that this country will never reach its potential if it ignores places like Mississippi.”