Scott Colom becomes Mississippi’s first Black Senator since Reconstruction

After a tight race, Scott Colom is the projected winner of Mississippi’s Senate seat, flipping the historically red state blue.

After a week of tense vote counting, Democrat challenger Scott Colom is the projected winner of Mississippi’s Senate race.

Following a shockingly tight race in a historically red state, Mississippi voters turned the state’s Senate seat blue for the first time since the 1980s. With 99% of the vote in, CNN and the Associated Press have called the race for Colom in a tight race against Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith.

“At this stage in the vote tally for Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race, a Cindy Hyde-Smith victory is now a mathematical impossibility,” a statement from Colom read prior to CNN calling the race.

Hyde-Smith had been the first woman elected to the Senate from Mississippi when she was appointed in 2018 to fill a vacancy. She won a special election that year and was re-elected to serve a full six-year term in the Senate in 2020.

With this win, Colom becomes the state’s first Black senator since Blanche K. Bruce held the position in 1881. Similarly, Colom’s win marks the first time the state has elected a democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1982. 

A proud seventh-generation Mississippian, Colom has worked as a prosecutor, judge, and District Attorney. Throughout his campaign, he has gained support from notable members of the democratic party, including Sen. Raphael Warnock, former Vice President Kamala Harris, President Barack Obama, former Rep. Stacey Abrams, and more. 

“Scott didn’t surge. Scott’s been building,” Abrams previously told theGrio of Colom’s campaign. “He’s been doing this work. He’s been running this race. Scott has positioned himself and the people of Mississippi and a campaign that has never forgotten who he’s running for; the kind of success that I think we’re going to see on Tuesday.”

Colom’s win comes as the state reports a notably heavy turnout for midterm elections, despite some voters reporting issues with voter registration verification and ballot-scanner glitches.

Voter verification became a heavy topic of discussion in the days following Election Day, as thousands of affidavit ballots had to be counted due to registration irregularities across the state, including in heavily populated Hinds County.