Mississippi Picked Another Senator Instead

On Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., community jazz radio station WPFW-FM had the uplift classics in rotation. Nnenna Freelon’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” Deniece Williams’s “Black Butterfly,” and because, of course, Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.”

Simone called the 1964 anthem her “first civil rights song”:

Alabama’ s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.

Several hours earlier, the Associated Press had seen enough. With his 4,669-vote lead in the Mississippi Senate race, the traditional arbiter of American election results declared Scott Colom the winner in what was arguably the most scrutinized set of election returns since 2000. The race was so close and so potentially contentious—incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Colom had lawyered up—that AP actually explained why editors decided to call the election before local officials had completed their review of an estimated 12,000 ballots. But Hyde-Smith diplomatically conceded, and the Mississippi Republican Party chair even admitted that Colom “ran a good campaign.”

Scott Colom rode the crest of the blue tsunami. For African Americans, it’s a unifying victory that reverberates far beyond the Deep South and the man who is Mississippi’s third African American senator since the First Reconstruction and the first Black man directly elected by the state’s voters to serve in the U.S. Senate.

But navigating the Second Redemption, the ultraconservative reaction to the post-1968 civil rights gains, means the United States has some heavy lifting to do. Mississippi is one barometer of the struggles facing a country that’s gone hurtling back in time from the advances just 20 years ago when Americans elected Barack Obama president. Colom’s victory, a feat once considered improbable, inconceivable, and then some, is a generational triumph, one most people didn’t even know was happening or preferred to dismiss because, you know, a Black man … in Mississippi.

“THEY LITERALLY LAUGHED.” That’s what Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) reported was the reaction when he made the case for donations to the Colom campaign to a group of Democratic donors. Voting rights organizers have complained for decades that Democrats have ignored the Deep South despite the comparatively lower costs to run a campaign in states like Mississippi. Democratic heavy hitters including former President Bill Clinton finally parachuted into Mississippi last month to support him, and Warnock eventually raised almost $1 million for Colom, making the potential 2028 presidential aspirant look like a kingmaker. And on the ground, grassroots voter outreach had been happening for years, thanks to local leaders, voting rights advocates, and national leaders like Stacey Abrams.

In retrospect, pouring money into Mississippi earlier would have signaled to the Republicans that the Democrats had reason to believe that they had a candidate with an edge—which probably would have prompted comparable GOP investments into Hyde-Smith’s campaign. When they finally did sit up and take notice, a last-minute appearance by President Trump probably sent more votes Colom’s way. The GOP now knows that Mississippi is in play and won’t repeat their midterm mistakes if 75-year-old Sen. Roger Wicker runs for re-election in 2030.

Scott Colom rode the crest of the blue tsunami. For African Americans, it’s a unifying victory that reverberates far beyond the Deep South.

Colom made the very best of operating under the country’s political and national media radar, a campaign that will be mined for clues for the foreseeable future. He enlisted his talented filmmaker identical twin brother Andrew, who, along with content creator Ryan Sayles, produced a series of ads using comedic takeoffs on Hyde-Smith’s flubs. (The first “pick another protein” ad vent viral riffing on the incumbent’s views on how Mississippians should respond to high beef prices.) That creative genius pool made Colom the envy of political communicators coast-to-coast.

The Colom ads underlined how humor could be a more powerful surrogate for an underdog. After Colom’s ads took off, Troy Jackson’s campaign in Maine came up with an amusing, defiant response to a negative commercial that Sen. Susan Collins’s campaign ran in the waning days of his campaign. And the Colom crew was certainly light-years ahead of whatever it was that motivated Vivek Ramaswamy’s nasty bit of Ohio business that backfired and sent the candidate home.

Outside Mississippi, Colom’s platform got lost in the collective stupefaction that burst on the scene once people realized that there was a real race to be had in Mississippi. He ran on ending the Iran war and the Trump administration’s disastrous tariffs regime, one that raised the costs of fuel and diesel for farmers who harvest soybeans, one of the state’s major agricultural products. He’s promised to join with his new colleagues to redirect war powers back to the Senate.

On health care, Colom wants to see the Medicaid cuts canceled and Affordable Care Act subsidies restored. In 2026, an estimated 145,000 people in Mississippi will be uninsured due to expiring ACA subsidies, and more than 16,500 fewer people will be enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP. Over the longer term, he supports some type of public option. He also wants to work on eliminating the federal income tax for every American making less than $75,000 annually, a much heavier lift.

Colom credited young people for getting him over the finish line. Even so, more than 200 Jackson State students had their votes tossed for a variety of errors, among them voting in the wrong county or not being registered to vote at all. Nationwide, young people and particularly young people of color surged to the polls and broke heavily for Democrats. His every-vote-counts campaign refrain clearly resonated. The narrowest of victories—Colom’s 49.2 percent to Hyde-Smith’s 48.7 percent—drove this message home to Gen Z, especially the Jackson State students who had their votes tossed.

IN HIS “I HAVE A DREAM” SPEECH, Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out: “We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.” When it comes to voting, Scott Colom, like Zohran Mamdani in New York City, has done the work to reach young people and educate them on how voting enhances their ability to propel change.

If Mamdani instilled the idea in young New Yorkers that there are people to vote for who will make a difference from day one, Colom also paved the way for a similar psychological shift among young African American and rural residents. One brother in the “Sinators” campaign video calls a faith leader to say, “Pastor, we need the whole congregation. Tell everybody we need them to vote, even out in the rural counties.”

While the widespread, deadly voter disenfranchisement of the pre–civil rights era is a historical relic, the remnants of that period remain in Mississippi: the absence of early voting, which is prevalent elsewhere; an affidavit ballot regime tarred by the use of Experian’s unverified credit card data that officials used to conduct voter roll purges (the company maintains that the data was not intended to be used that way); moving and reducing the number of polling places; and more.

The district attorney took a somber tone in his last ad, a tribute to Medgar Evers, the Mississippi civil rights leader who was assassinated on his way into his Jackson home, his arms full of “Jim Crow must go” T-shirts. “On Tuesday, use your vote and honor everyone who died for that right,” Colom said in the ad.

With the sting of the Supreme Court decisions decimating the Voting Rights Act, “Jim Crow must go” is the what’s-old-is-new-again rallying cry for the next generation of voting rights advocates—and not only in Mississippi. Marking Evers’s death in an ad destined for social media is a stark reminder of the psychic debt all African Americans pay down every time they vote.

After her civil rights song underscored some shocking truths for Americans, Nina Simone wrote:

What I didn’t appreciate was that while Medgar Evers’s murder was not the final straw for me, it was the match that lit the fuse. The bombing of the little girls in Alabama and [Evers’s] murder were like the final pieces of a jigsaw that made no sense until you had finally fitted the whole thing together. I suddenly realized what it was to be black in America in 1963 … it came as a rush of fury, hatred, and determination.

And yet, 63 years later, in these dark days of the Second Redemption, an African American man from “the Sip” is a U.S. senator.

Mississippi, goddam.