Scott Colom, a Democrat, will be Mississippi’s next U.S. senator and the first Black senator to represent the state in the U.S. Capitol since 1881. His historic feat comes just six years after Mississippi retired its old Confederate-themed state flag.
The 43-year-old district attorney defeated incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican junior senator, and upended years of conventional wisdom about Mississippi’s status as a “solid red state.” The Associated Press called the race on Wednesday evening.
Colom now heads to Washington as one of eight new Democratic senators to have flipped their states—possibly nine when Alaska’s election concludes. It’s a freshman class sworn in at the twilight of the Trump era, with Democrats taking firm control of both houses of Congress and a flat majority of governorships.
For over a week, the Colom’s march to victory maintained a slow velocity as the vote total trickled in, while local election officials cured and counted affidavit and absentee ballots. From the moment Hyde-Smith’s lead evaporated in the late hours of election night to the AP’s call today, the lead only grew for Colom, with Democratic gains across every county in the state.
The Democratic campaign peeled off unprecedented swathes of voters in formerly Republican strongholds. His campaign says he held more than 70 town halls across the state. Nationally viral ad campaigns critiquing Hyde-Smith’s policies pushed the senator-elect where no Democrat has gone in decades, especially set against the familiar absence of Colom’s opponent from the campaign trail with the exception of only a few small stops.
Colom’s victory is the exclamation mark on the most dramatic Democratic electoral victory since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, and by the numbers perhaps an even more lopsided win. Across the U.S., voters rejected Republican officeholders as the Trump administration faced backlash over inflation, tariffs, a violent deportation regime, rampant allegations of corruption, the historically unpopular U.S.-Israel war against Iran and continued U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
Colom, who launched his campaign after Sen. Hyde-Smith used a Senate procedure to block then-President Biden’s nomination of him to the federal bench, defeated her with just over 49% of the vote.
Hyde-Smith conceded Wednesday evening, saying in a video that serving in the U.S. Senate “has been one of the greatest honors of my life.”
“While this is not the outcome we worked for or hoped for, I respect the decision of Mississippi voters. I want to congratulate Scott Colom and wish him well as he takes on the tremendous responsibility of representing our great state,” she said.
Mississippi’s Last Democratic Senator Was a Segregationist Before Supporting the VRA
Scott Colom is a seventh-generation Mississippian from Columbus, Mississippi. He is the child of Dorothy Winston Colom, a retired Chancery Court judge who was the first Black judge in the history of her district’s court, and Wilbur Colom, an attorney and former Republican campaigner. Wilbur Colom was once a member of the transition team for President Ronald Reagan and was part of the first Senate campaign for former Sen. Thad Cochran, who in 1977 became the first Republican from Mississippi to claim a U.S. Senate seat in 100 years.
Colom faced the same skepticism and slim odds that have foiled the campaigns of every Democratic nominee for Senate since the final election of John C. Stennis, a segregationist and the inheritor of arch-racist former Mississippi governor Theodore G. Bilbo’s Senate seat.
Stennis’ views changed some over the years. He voted to extend the Voting Rights Act in 1982 despite fiercely opposing it in the 1960s. In a 2006 interview with Jackson Free Press editor Donna Ladd in Jackson during an earlier presidential bid, then-Sen. Joe Biden recalled meeting with Stennis on the day of his retirement. Stennis, Biden said, told him that even though he had opposed it, the Civil Rights Movement “freed my soul.”
In the years since Stennis left office, again and again Mississippi Democratic nominees found themselves in striking distance of Republican incumbents and heirs apparent. They came close but never crossed the final threshold, held back by an ascendant Republican Party and a national reputation for Mississippi as one of the sturdiest planks in the modern Solid South.
In 2018, Mike Espy came closest, winning 46% of the vote to Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s 54%. During that campaign, Hyde-Smith drew controversy for saying she would “be on the front row” if a supporter invited her to “a public hanging,” and the Jackson Free Press, the predecessor to the Mississippi Free Press, broke the story of her history with segregation academies.
But it was Colom, the erudite former judge and district attorney, who would finally break the spell, unseating Hyde-Smith amidst a national electoral revolt against the Republican Party and President Donald Trump.
Colom, a Millsaps College graduate with a law degree from the University of Wisconsin, spent a significant portion of his university career abroad, including a 16-month stint in rural Guyana, teaching English in a village through the World Teach Program. Colom relates the story of a pupil’s mother dying young, leaving their child an orphan, as a formative experience in his development. This, he told the Mississippi Free Press, helped him decide to return to Mississippi: a state familiar indeed with the sting of maternal mortality, to contribute to the community he came from.
From there, Colom completed an internship with the prosecutorial office of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Tanzania, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, later working for the Mississippi Center for Justice and then returning to his family’s law firm in his home county.
In this period, Colom’s career in public service took shape, including roles as an interim Justice Court Judge in Lowndes County, a municipal judgeship in Aberdeen and city prosecutor for his hometown, Columbus.
In 2015, Colom was elected to serve as District Attorney for the 16th Circuit Court District of Mississippi, which includes Oktibbeha, Lowndes, Noxubee and Clay counties, a role in which he served until his election as senator. His tenure as district attorney helped propel him to statewide significance.
Colom’s office reports a personal 94% conviction rate, but the senator-elect has also made headlines for expansion of pretrial diversion, in which nonviolent defendants were given the option of charge dismissal in exchange for participation in rehabilitative programs. He also led the implementation of restorative justice initiatives that brought together offenders and their victims after conviction.
The district attorney also assisted with the dismissal of wrongful convictions in some high-profile cases, including that of Eddie Lee Howard, whose 1994 conviction on faulty bite mark evidence left him on death row for 26 years; and Tameshia Shelton, whose 2009 murder conviction was thrown out in 2025.
‘We’re Not Some Locked Down Red State’
In his campaign, Colom managed to thread a particularly fine needle—making the election a referendum on historically unpopular Republican policies without reducing the contest to a mere skirmish in an essentially national battle.
Nowhere was that strategy clearer than Colom’s appearance at an emergency Trump rally in support of U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in the fading days of the campaign, itself one of the surest signs that the state’s ruby red reputation was seriously in jeopardy.
In the video that the senator-elect’s team released, there was little friction between Colom and the long convoy of Trump voters. Voters shared their anxiety over high prices. A desire for the U.S. military to depart from its voluntary expedition into Iran. A pointed request to keep AIPAC and the Israeli lobby out of American politics.
Hyde-Smith, for her part, did little to personally pitch her own campaign to those present at the rally, speaking for roughly 10 minutes before one of President Trump’s characteristically rambling hour-and-a-half-long appeals.
“At the end of the day, you’ve got to put Mississippi above D.C. politics,” Colom told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug. 25, 2025. “You can trust Senator Wicker to do that. You cannot trust Senator Hyde-Smith to do that. She is going to do whatever Mitch McConnell, you know, Ted Cruz, (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) thinks. She cares more about what they think than what we think.”
For most of the race, Colom was nationally discounted, categorized in most professional analyses as just outside the range of possibility even as most polls pointed toward a strong Democratic wave nationwide.
But as the race neared its end, the campaign’s success began to draw more attention, most notably with a series of political ads lampooning Hyde-Smith’s gaffes and close allegiance to Trump. In one, Colom and his twin brother Andrew took the role of Smoke and Stack Moore from the film Sinners. In another, the most viral of the moments from the Mississippi election season as a whole, performers responded to Hyde-Smith’s suggestion that cash-strapped Mississippians pick from a variety of non-beef proteins by insisting they’d rather pick another senator instead.
Mississippi Democrats may not be able to count on a national environment as fertile for their candidates in the future. But Brandon Presley, the unsuccessful 2023 Democratic nominee for Mississippi governor, told the Mississippi Free Press in a Nov. 11 interview that Colom’s breakthrough represented a permanent alteration of political engagement in the state.
“When you look at people who have pent up political desire to make a change, and they finally get that victory, you cannot unring that bell. It foundationally changes Mississippi politics. It shows that we’re not some locked down red state,” Presley said.
Colom is Mississippi’s First Black Senator Elected By the People
Scott Colom has two Black predecessors in the Senate, both coming from the nation’s distant past. U.S. Sen. Hiram Revels, the first Black man to serve in either house of Congress, and Sen. Blanche K. Bruce, the last Black senator in the entire nation until the election of Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts in 1967.
Revels was born free, but Bruce was born into slavery. The Mississippi Legislature chose both to serve during Reconstruction. Scott Colom is the first Black senator from Mississippi to be elected by a vote of the people in history.
Blanche K. Bruce arrived in the Senate with his own era nearly behind him. It was 1875 when the Mississippi State Legislature sent him to Washington. Reconstruction, the unfinished reconciliation and full enfranchisement of the newly freed Black American citizens liberated in the Civil War, was nearing its end in Mississippi, thanks to violent resistance by myriad white-supremacist groups, including the newly created Ku Klux Klan that terrorized Black and white people who supported Reconstruction and the Black vote.
The very same year he took office, the revanchist forces of white supremacy, including paramilitary bands like the Red Shirts, successfully crushed Black participation in statewide elections at the barrel of a gun. This violent “Mississippi Plan” and massacres of Black and white Reconstructionists provided a model for other post-Confederate states to crush nonwhite franchise, and as the federal government backed down from using military force to disperse the militias, Bruce stayed on in Washington D.C., a living relic of a lost era.
It did not pass notice to the men who shared the chamber with Bruce that his congressional career represented the fading promise of equal representation for an enormous swath of the South.
“Mr. Bruce,” said Republican Sen. John Logan on the Senate floor in 1879, “the respected Senator from Mississippi, stands alone upon this floor as the last representative of four million people who through trials and bloodshed were brought to a view of the promised land only to be sunk into the depths of renewed despair.”
“Cain,” asked Logan then, “what hast thou done with thy brother?”
Bruce’s term expired on March 3, 1881, years after the departure of federal troops from the South. Taking his place was Sen. James Z. George, a former Confederate slaveowner, the Democrat who would serve as the chief architect of Mississippi’s nakedly racist 1890 constitution, which, through literacy tests, poll taxes and legislative apportionment, would make organized Black electoral action an impossibility.
Bruce’s replacement did not mince words: his goal was the infinite suppression of Black political power. “The plan,” George said the year the new constitution was adopted, “is to invest permanently the powers of government in the hands of the people who ought to have them—the white people.”
The plan was successful. From that day in March nearly 150 years ago, no Black Mississippian would serve in any statewide elected office. Not during the long years of coercive labor laws and Jim Crow, with countless Black sharecroppers forced back into punitive labor and effective slavery. Not amidst the ebb and flow of the KKK, reanimated again and again. Not during the long period when hundreds upon hundreds of Black people, and a good number of whites, were lynched in Mississippi alone, whether for trying to teach Black children to read or for trying to register Black adults to vote. Not throughout the long days of the Civil Rights era, besieged by campaigns of racist terror and assassinations, nor any other days to come.
Not until today.
Speaking to the U.S. Senate in 1876, not long after the failure of Reconstruction and the prevailing of the forces of white supremacy in Mississippi, Bruce still struck a hopeful tone. “I have confidence, not only in this country and her institutions, but in the endurance, capacity, and destiny of my people.”
‘My Obligation to Future Generations’
Scott Colom now heads to Washington to inaugurate a new chapter in U.S. politics. The first two years of his term will be spent as part of an ascendant political bloc presiding over Donald Trump’s last two years in office.
Colom, elected on a mandate to deliver a more affordable life for Mississippians, and an America less entangled in aggressive wars and trade disputes, will have to face similarly stiff odds upon his reelection campaign in 2032. But it is possible that his accomplishment will alter a Mississippi map that for more than a generation has been seen as immutable.
“It is a generational, tectonic shift towards a more inclusive Mississippi. It’s not that far in the distant past that nobody would have believed that Mississippi would have elected a Black man to the Senate,” Brandon Presley said.
Colom has made clear that he sees the historic significance of his victory.
“Whenever I think about making history,” Colom told TheGrio in September, “I also think about my obligation to future generations and making sure that I perform and have the ethics and the values, the vision, that make it easier for the next person to be judged on their merits,” to ensure, he said, that it would not be another 150 years before his feat is repeated.
Follow the Mississippi Free Press’ coverage of the 2026 elections and read past stories here. Continue to follow the MFP’s Trusted Elections Liveblog as the 2027 campaign for legislative and statewide offices begins.
Mississippi Free Press stories are always free because we believe everyone should have access to quality journalism. Donations from readers like you make that possible. Please click here to give to help sustain and grow vital, people-over-power journalism for Mississippians.
Readers can sign up for our free newsletters here.
