In a major upset, Scott Colom has defeated Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi, NBC News projects, capping off a string of Democratic victories by flipping the reddest seat yet in this year’s midterms.
Mississippi last elected a Democrat to the Senate 44 years ago, just a few weeks before Colom was born in 1982. Colom will become Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.
The historic win comes after days of uncertainty in the race, with Colom holding a razor-thin lead over Hyde-Smith as more votes continued to be counted. Colom, a district attorney, remained confident throughout the vote counting that he would prevail.
“For months and months, I’ve been telling everybody, everywhere I go, that we’re going to win this election. I was saying it eight and nine months ago,” Colom told a crowd of his supporters in Jackson on Wednesday night.
Colom emphasized that what he described as the “Mississippi faith tradition” guided his campaign and said, “This journey started with a prayer.”
“All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” he said. “I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we can show the country that Mississippi matters.”
Colom said that “in Mississippi, our prayers have often changed the course of history,” noting that the first Black senator ever elected in the U.S. came from Mississippi.
He ended his remarks by promising to represent all Mississippians, including “the ones that voted for me, the ones that didn’t vote for me and the ones that didn’t vote.”
Hyde-Smith congratulated Colom in a video message Wednesday evening.
“While this is not the outcome we worked for or hoped for, I respect the decision of Mississippi voters,” she said. “I want to congratulate Scott Colom and wish him well as he takes on the tremendous responsibility of representing our great state.”
Colom’s campaign confirmed to NBC News that Hyde-Smith had called him to concede.
Colom’s victory means Democrats will hold at least 55 Senate seats next year. The only Senate race left to be called is in Alaska.
In the next Congress, no Democratic senator will represent a redder state than Colom. Donald Trump carried Mississippi by 23 percentage points in 2024. Colom’s victory also underscores the Trump administration’s broad unpopularity with voters just two years after that presidential election, even in parts of the ruby-red Deep South.
A majority of Mississippi voters said they disapproved of Trump’s overall job performance, according to NBC News exit polling. Majorities also said that his policies, including tariffs, hurt the economy and that it was wrong for the U.S. to take military action in Iran.
Colom, the eighth Democrat to flip a Republican-held Senate seat so far this year, long believed Democrats had an opportunity to win Mississippi, given its sizable Black population and plenty of white voters in rural areas who he thought could back a Democrat. He chided his party for writing off the state.
“We were never a lost cause. We were a betrayed cause,” Colom recently told NBC News. “We were betrayed by Cindy Hyde-Smith because she allowed tariffs to hurt us. She allowed people — hundreds of thousands of Mississippians — to lose healthcare. She gave away our voice in the war in Iran, which drove up costs for farmers and for truckers and for businesses.”
“But for too long we were also a betrayed cause by the national party, because they did not compete in this state,” Colom added.
In late October, the Senate Majority PAC, a top Democratic super PAC, announced an ad campaign in the state through Election Day, starting with a 30-second spot that presented Colom as a crusader who would “fight corruption in both parties.” The group ended up spending nearly $2.1 million on the airwaves, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
The GOP super PAC Senate Leadership Fund responded with a similar-sized buy, airing ads that painted Colom as “too liberal” and “too radical.”
The race also drew high-profile surrogates from both parties. Trump traveled to Mississippi eight days before the election, while Democrats such as former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Raphael Warnock of Georgia hit the campaign trail for Colom. Former President Barack Obama also appeared in an ad that the Colom campaign launched on digital platforms.
Republicans tried to leverage those surrogates against Colom, with the Senate Leadership Fund launching one ad with a narrator saying, “Colom proudly campaigns with Kamala Harris because Colom supports their radical agenda.”
But it was not enough to defeat Colom, who sharply criticized Hyde-Smith’s vote for Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which cut Medicaid funds. Colom also faulted Hyde-Smith’s support for the Trump administration’s tariff regime and the costly war with Iran, labeling his opponent “Cindy High Prices.”
Colom’s campaign also created a viral video highlighting Hyde-Smith’s comments that Mississippians struggling with high beef prices “have so many proteins to choose from.” The video featured clips of people saying: “Pick another protein? I’d rather pick another senator.”
NAACP President Derrick Johnson praised Colom’s victory, calling it proof that Mississippi and other states in the South were “underinvested in.”
“The Scott Colom campaign proves that it is possible to win in the South when there’s investment,” Johnson said in an interview, adding that he hopes Colom’s victory will show that a state like Mississippi is not “deep red,” but rather “an opportunity state.”
Johnson added that the Supreme Court’s April decision gutting the Voting Rights Act was “a direct attack on the rights of Black voters,” saying it was one of the many realities that urged people to turn out to vote. He also cited affordability and foreign wars as motivators.
“Folks were seeing that we were losing grip in this country, that we were losing our democracy, that our very essence as a community, our community, was under attack, and people stood up and fought back at the ballot box,” Johnson said.
Hyde-Smith, a former state agriculture commissioner who was appointed to the Senate in 2018 and won a full term in 2020, campaigned as a reliable conservative and tried to portray Colom as a “radical” progressive. She also touted her loyalty to Trump, who endorsed her more than a year before the midterms and said she was “100% MAGA.”
Hyde-Smith said that over the last week, her campaign team “worked tirelessly to ensure every legally cast vote was counted and that the people of Mississippi received a fair and transparent election.”
“I am proud of what we have accomplished together, but I want to make one thing very clear: An election may come to an end, but our commitment to Mississippi never will,” she said.
Colom and Hyde-Smith had crossed paths before this year’s midterm elections. She blocked his nomination for a federal judgeship during the Biden administration. Colom recently told NBC News that he had forgiven her.
