Scott Colom, a local district attorney, officially seized a seat in the U.S. Senate, the Associated Press projected Wednesday, a breathtaking victory that solidified the Democrats’ ascendance in Washington and the potential for a political realignment in the South.
From a state that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as “sweltering with the heat of injustice,” Colom is the first Black man popularly elected statewide in Mississippi and its first Black senator since Reconstruction. Since Reconstruction, the state has long been associated with political dispositions that would have rendered Colom’s rise as an African American and a Democrat unthinkable — from its poll taxes and literacy test in the Jim Crow Era, to the murders of activists trying to register Black people to vote, to aligning with deeply conservative politics that propelled President Donald Trump to the presidency by 22 points in 2024.
“Some leaders will fall into the trap of saying, ‘I’m going to divide the voters and I’m going to distract them,’” Colom recently told The Washington Post. “That strategy has worked a lot in the past, but I had been closer to the ground. … I had to do some advertising, but I knew if I could raise enough money and talk about the issues that matter, talk about my values, my faith, I knew I could win.”
No Democrat has won a statewide election since 1982. It was that year that Colom, 43, was born to a prominent family — his father, a Reagan-appointed judge and his mother, an attorney. Throughout his campaign, Colom insisted that politics were changing in Mississippi and he had a chance to win against incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, whom he accused of taking the Senate seat for granted.
As such, Colom campaigned in all of the state’s 82 counties — often in a sweatshirt and a pair of tech pants — bashing Hyde-Smith’s unwillingness to stand up to Trump on high gas and food prices, questioning why she hosted no town halls and vowing to bring “Mississippi values to Washington.” He allayed fears of his progressivism through charting his support of the Second Amendment and commending Trump for ending taxes on tips.
In the end, Colom capitalized on a wave of enthusiasm among Black voters — whom exit polls indicate voted for him in overwhelming margins — after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. He vowed never to forget them, or the sacrifices of their ancestors.
“It was a lot of hard work,” Colom said. “I mean, going out and talking to people every day for a year and a half is not that easy. That’s very difficult. But yeah, I worked very, very hard and I think that hard work is part of the recipe for my success.”
Colom has a history of being a trailblazer. At 28, he became the youngest and first Black judge appointed in the history of Lowndes County and later the first Black city prosecutor for Columbus. He successfully ran for district attorney for Mississippi’s 16th Circuit Court District in 2015, running on a reformist agenda that emphasized diversion programs for nonviolent offenders, and unseated a nearly 30-year incumbent. As district attorney, he managed a small staff and personally prosecuted more than two dozen jury trials — obtaining guilty verdicts in nearly all of them.
In 2023, Hyde-Smith blocked Colom from serving on the U.S. District Court of Northern Mississippi, citing his receiving money from the family of George Soros and his stance on trans rights as the reason for her objection.
During the campaign, he questioned Hyde-Smith’s decision to advertise in his hometown of Columbus, located in Lowndes County, where he had been a popular prosecutor. “I could tell it backfired because people are like,” ‘Give me a yard sign,’” Colom said.
Beyond his support from the state’s Black voters, Colom’s victory came thanks to support from college students and White moderates and conservatives, who were taken with witty commercials.
One ad — in which everyday people chide Hyde-Smith for suggesting they find other proteins to eat in the face of rising beef prices — had national reach. A man flipping burgers while saying, “Pick another protein? Shiee…” became one of the most memorable quotes of the election season.
“He was a person everyone could relate to,” said Roderick Talley, 39, an entrepreneur and activist in Lexington, Mississippi. “He has a younger face to him and he seemed real and his commercials had real people that we knew. I think that’s why he got so many young people energized.”
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