Hyde-Smith blocked Colom’s 2022 judicial nomination under Senate tradition
Scott Colom closed his campaign for U.S. Senate 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 and died in front of his family. “In Mississippi, no one is above the law, and no one should be outside its protection,” Colom said in the ad, recounting 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 honor everyone who died for that right.”
The closing message capped a narrow victory over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith that the Associated Press called Wednesday, after local elections officials spent several days processing absentee and provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots in Mississippi. 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, and will become the state’s first Black U.S. senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction.
Colom’s narrow victory marks a political shift in Mississippi, a state controlled mostly by white conservatives for generations, and its effects extend beyond the state’s borders. The outcome adds to midterm defeats for President Donald Trump’s party in several Republican-controlled states, and bolsters the argument from some Democrats that the party’s future runs through the American South. Mississippi last chose a new Democratic senator in 1947, and the winner then was, according to the Associated Press report, a staunch segregationist.
On the trail, Colom pointed to voters’ basic expectations of their senator. “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.
Colom said during the campaign that he could represent all of Mississippi, a state where racial divisions have long defined its politics and society. “It’s got to be about having a party that represents rural America again, suburban America, urban America — a party that makes sure we actually deliver for voters in ways that make their lives better, and we don’t come up with excuses as to why we can’t do it,” he said.
The contest was a latecomer to the national spotlight — a race Washington once viewed as a longshot — drawing attention from Democrats who belatedly infused cash into Colom’s candidacy. The son of a onetime Republican who worked for President Ronald Reagan, Colom drew notice for an aggressive campaign as Democrats widened the Senate battleground map and Hyde-Smith’s vulnerabilities crystallized.
Black Democrats including Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia highlighted his bid early. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer helped Colom raise money, and he drew financial support from other outside players, including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a billionaire and potential presidential candidate. Former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned on Colom’s behalf in the campaign’s closing weeks.
Colom attracted particular notice for some of the year’s most widely circulated campaign ads. After Hyde-Smith, 67, 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 for a rally with Hyde-Smith, Colom walked the line of Trump supporters as they waited outside the gates, introducing himself, asking about their concerns and explaining his priorities. Later that evening, Trump called Hyde-Smith to the stage, and she said nine words in six seconds: “Is this not the best president in our lifetime?” Then she stepped away. “I love that,” Trump replied when he continued his 80-plus minutes at the microphone. “Sometimes they get up and they talk for 10 minutes.”
The appearance tracked Colom’s tactic of criticizing Trump’s policies — especially the Iran war and tariffs that he said were especially hard on Mississippi farmers — without taking personal jabs at the president or the people who voted for him. Instead, he consistently put the onus on Hyde-Smith, framing her as a non-entity in Washington, a critique that resonated in a state accustomed to long-serving senators such as Thad Cochran, Trent Lott and John Stennis, who rose to powerful posts and routed federal money back to Mississippi.
The matchup carried a particular irony. In 2022, then-President Joe Biden nominated Colom to be a U.S. District Court judge in the Northern District of Mississippi, and Mississippi’s senior Republican senator, Roger Wicker, and former Gov. Haley Barbour, a former national Republican chairman, backed the nomination. Hyde-Smith blocked Colom’s confirmation under the Senate tradition that allows home-state members to spike a president’s choices for federal judicial positions. Colom said his Senate bid was never about getting even with Hyde-Smith.
With the largest share of Black voters of any state, Mississippi’s general elections have been closer for years than those of its immediate Southern neighbors. Trump won the state by double digits in each of his three presidential contests, but Republican Gov. Tate Reeves managed to win reelection in 2023 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 voter 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. Nearly all of the state moved leftward from the 2024 election, when Trump carried Mississippi by nearly 23 points.
Then-Gov. Phil Bryant first appointed Hyde-Smith, then the state agriculture commissioner, to the Senate in 2018 when Cochran resigned. She won a special election runoff in 2018 and a full term in 2020, both times defeating Democrat Mike Espy, a former U.S. agriculture secretary who had also been Mississippi’s first Black congressman since Reconstruction.
During the extended vote count, Colom acknowledged the historic nature of doing what Espy could not. But he said he sees his place more in terms of other Mississippians, especially its youngest residents, than his individual story. “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.”