For four decades, the typical plan the national Democratic Party had for Mississippi was to leave it alone. Seems like they finally found their winning strategy: Democrat Scott Colom has narrowly eked out a razor-thin win over incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, and arguably, it was because he let her do the talking.
Colom is the first Democrat Mississippi sent to the Senate since noted segregationist John Stennis won his last term in 1982. Mississippi, which up until last week’s elections was nearly unanimously rated as a solid Republican state, is the only state in the country that doesn’t allow automatic recounts, meaning the loser has to go to court to get the votes reexamined.
What’s notable about the race is the sheer lack of attention it has garnered (at least, up until recently) and how Colom even became a viable contender in the first place. In 2022, President Joe Biden nominated Colom, a district attorney, to the federal bench in northern Mississippi. Mississippi’s senior senator, Republican Roger Wicker, supported him. Hyde-Smith blocked the nomination in 2023, citing his “opposition to legislation to protect female athletes” and past support from a PAC funded by George Soros. Had she let it through, Colom might be a federal judge today instead of her successor. Two years later, he announced his campaign against her.
Likely Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer saw an opening. He told the New York Times in 2025 he wanted to help elect a Democrat in Mississippi and find other winning tickets in states that would be relatively cheap to compete in. While he referenced Colom at the time, Colom said Schumer isn’t why he ran: in his launch video, he referenced his two daughters and Hyde-Smith’s vote for a law he said would cut more than 100,000 Mississippians from their health care.
Kitchen table economics
That kitchen table economic sentiment may be why Colom won in a state represented, for now, by a cattle rancher.
In February, a reporter asked Hyde-Smith, who also married a fifth-generation cattle rancher, what Republicans were doing about rising beef prices. “You know, you have so many proteins to choose from,” she said. Ground beef had risen from $5.55 a pound when President Donald Trump returned to office to $6.79 in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Colom’s campaign turned her answer into an ad of Mississippians reacting to it, a move widely regarded to have tipped the scale in his favor. The ad’s release was also when the national Democratic Party started showing up. Former President Bill Clinton rallied for him in Tupelo on Oct. 30. “Scott is the correction,” Clinton told the crowd. Still, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee put just $500,000 into the race in its final week, while Hyde-Smith raised about $6.3 million for her campaign. Colom wasn’t alone, though: counting outside groups, money spent backing him outpaced money backing Hyde-Smith roughly three to one, according to FEC data.
The win was mostly Colom: he held events in all 82 Mississippi counties, the Washington Post reported, while Hyde-Smith hadn’t held a town hall in six years. Local organizers did the rest. When Holmes County, home to about 15,000 people, reported its votes near midnight on election night, its surge in turnout put Colom ahead by 28 votes.
Colom also flipped Forrest County, named for the Ku Klux Klan’s first grand wizard, 12,064 to 9,749, and won Jefferson Davis County, named for the president of the Confederacy, 2,943 to 1,534. He would also be Mississippi’s first Black senator since Blanche K. Bruce, who was born into slavery and left office in 1881, and the first Black senator the state’s voters have ever chosen directly. Mississippi’s first, Hiram Revels, was also the nation’s first Black senator, appointed by the state legislature in 1870.
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Democrats with 56 seats
Democrats entered Election Day with 47 Senate seats and were projected to flip at least seven. Now already with control of both chambers, Colom makes it 55. If Democrat Mary Peltola holds her narrow lead in Alaska, where counting continues, it’s 56.
The difference between 54 and 56 shows up in the filibuster. Most legislation needs 60 votes to end debate and pass the Senate. At 54 seats, Democrats would need six Republicans to cross over, but at 56, they need four.
A bigger majority also gives Schumer room on his own side. With 51 seats, a single Democratic defection can sink a nominee or a party-line vote. With 56, he can lose several and still confirm judges and officials, which takes only a simple majority. That matters for Trump’s picks as well: a Democratic Senate can now block his nominees to the federal bench, the kind of seat Colom was once denied.
The lesson of Mississippi isn’t only for Democrats. Voters named the cost of living and government corruption as their top two issues in AP exit polls. Two years earlier, voters who were worried about the economy broke for Trump by 2 to 1. The issue that won Republicans the White House helped cost them the Senate.
Some Republicans saw it coming. But Trump called affordability “a con job” by Democrats, even as nearly three-quarters of his own voters rated the cost of living bad or the worst ever. Vice President JD Vance warned his party not to blame young people for socialism’s growing appeal when they couldn’t afford homes, then answered one young voter’s affordability question with a joke.
“We used to own the affordability issue just two years ago,” Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York said. “We let that slip away.”
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