At the end of the night, though, Colom was up by twenty-eight votes. In the days that followed, as absentee and provisional ballots were processed, his lead crept past a thousand, then two, then four. On Wednesday, eight days after the election, Colom led by nearly five thousand votes, a wider margin than Hyde-Smith could overcome, and she conceded. A victory rally was quickly arranged at Tougaloo College, in Jackson, the capital, where Colom and his campaign staff had been operating out of the former headquarters of the Mississippi Democratic Party.
A berobed choir assembled. Supporters waved placards that read “SENATOR-ELECT SCOTT COLOM.” Bennie Thompson, who has long been Mississippi’s lone Black congressman, took the stage and noted how fitting it was to be celebrating at Tougaloo, a “safe haven for people who wanted to do right” and to “make this state a better place.” (Tougaloo was founded, in 1869, by Christian missionaries with the goal of educating freed slaves.) “All my friends kept saying, ‘I don’t know if the time is right.
Maybe you’re moving too fast. Maybe he’s too young,’ ” Thompson told the crowd. “Well, well. Here we are, with a winner.” Thompson had been calling it “poetic justice” that Hyde-Smith—who once appeared in a Facebook photo wearing a Confederate hat, at the homeplace of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, captioned “Mississippi history at its best!”—had helped engineer her own downfall.
In 2023, she blocked Colom’s appointment, by then
In 2023, she blocked Colom’s appointment, by then President Joe Biden, to the federal bench, thereby freeing him up to challenge her. Only two Black senators had ever served Mississippi: Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce. Both were sent to Washington, D.C., during Reconstruction, by the state legislature. This makes Colom the first Black senator ever elected by the people. “All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” he said at the victory rally.
“I had the courage to believe in Mississippi.”
Colom made his campaign slogan “Mississippi Matters” and used it to draw a contrast with Hyde-Smith. “Mississippi didn’t matter enough for her,” he told me. “She supported tariffs. She supported cutting health care. She voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill. If you’re looking out for Mississippi, you wouldn’t do these things.
Partisan politics were too important to her.” (Hyde-Smith called herself a “rock-solid conservative.”) Confidants tried to talk Colom out of the slogan, pushing alternatives such as “Mississippi Rising.” But he never wavered. “I felt like God had given it to me,” he explained. “God was proving me right, because when I started doing man-on-the-street videos, I realized it was something I could get anybody to say.”
To national party leaders and the media, Mississippi apparently didn’t matter, until it was almost too late.
For the better part of two years, Colom
For the better part of two years, Colom waited for outsiders to take him seriously. As late as last week, he was still such an unknown that he was having to teach America how to pronounce his name: “kuh-loam,” not “coll-um.” The first time I met him, four days after the election, he said, “Where were you months ago?” He let me spend a minute with him not because of what’s on my business card but because I’m from Tupelo, in northeast Mississippi, which isn’t far from where he lives, in Columbus, with his wife, Nadia, a real-estate agent, and their daughters, Luci, who turns ten in December, and Madi, who is eight.
Colom’s conversations always lead back to Mississippi. When he asked how I “got to The New Yorker,” and I joked that I’d “kicked the door down,” he noted, “That’s a value in Mississippi—persistence. We’re so disadvantaged, in so many ways, because ever since cotton stopped being a dominant commodity, we’ve never really had a strong economy.” What’s the answer to that?
I asked. He replied, “Honestly, we gotta figure it out.”
Hyde-Smith had done little to no campaigning, and refused to participate in a debate. Colom’s staff made “THE WHERE’S CINDY TOUR” placards and, on social media, referred to her as “Cindy Hide-Smith.” Colom appeared in many dozens of town halls and campaign stops across Mississippi’s eighty-two counties. Nadia recalled him coming home “tattered with exhaustion.” Often, no one showed up to hear him speak.
Colom told me about holding a press conference
Colom told me about holding a press conference outside a hospital in Clarksdale, in the Delta, where he “tried to talk about the cuts to Medicaid, and how it impacts rural health care.” No reporters. “The local press is decimated,” he said. Colom kept talking about “the math in Mississippi,” which has some of the most racially polarized voting in the country. Around thirty-seven per cent of the state’s population is Black; nearly all vote Democrat.
Three-quarters of the white population votes Republican. Colom knew that he would need to persuade some of them. “You’re saying these people won’t vote for us—when they’re getting their health care cut, and they got tariffs hurting farmers, and costs through the roof?” he said. “You don’t try to get their vote, you’re basically telling them, I don’t care that this stuff is happening to you.”
By the end of the summer, polls showed Democrats up by double digits nationally.
Colom was still projected to lose in deep-red Mississippi—but the margin was shockingly narrow. “The Democratic Party was not supporting him until they were, like, ‘Oh, wow, the polling data is real,’ ” Arekia Bennett-Scott, the executive director of Mississippi Votes, a nonpartisan civic-engagement organization in Jackson, told me. In late October, the Party finally sent cash—a modest two million dollars—and backup.
Kamala Harris campaigned in Clarksdale and Columbus; Bill
Kamala Harris campaigned in Clarksdale and Columbus; Bill Clinton appeared in Tupelo. “Pete Buttigieg, I begged that guy to come,” Colom told me. “He’s, like, ‘You think it’s gonna help?’ I said, ‘Man, I know it’s gonna help, because if you come down I’m gonna do a press conference about how she didn’t vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill but was at the Amtrak reopening, with Mardi Gras beads on, expecting people not to remember.’ ” He was talking about an appearance that Hyde-Smith had made, in August, 2025, for the relaunch of Amtrak’s Gulf Coast route, four years after opposing legislation that had provided nearly two hundred million dollars in funding for the project.
Buttigieg, who directed billions of dollars to Amtrak as Biden’s Transportation Secretary, is also a Navy veteran. This may have helped Colom with voters on the coast, which is home to major defense contractors such as Ingalls Shipbuilding, in Pascagoula. “Tell her about Ingalls shipyard,” Colom said to his political director, Theresa Kennedy, on Tuesday, as a sheriff’s deputy drove us, in a black S.U.V., to an event at a fire station on Medgar Evers Boulevard, in Jackson.
Kennedy, sitting in the front seat, holding two flats of doughnuts that Colom planned to present to the firefighters, told me that her dad had worked at Ingalls for more than twenty years. She remembered him getting up for his shift at three or four in the morning. “Those people work really hard,” she said. During the campaign, Kennedy had arranged an appearance at Ingalls, and drove Colom through the night to get there as he slept in the passenger seat.
Colom’s family jumped in, too
Colom’s family jumped in, too. Nadia appeared in campaign ads and operated a branded food truck, parking at music festivals and housing projects, and at factories, during shift changes, to hand out free meals. The signature dish was Pick Another Protein Tacos. The name derived from a moment, early this year, when Hyde-Smith replied to an interview question about the high price of beef by saying, “You know, you have so many proteins to choose from.” In February, Sarah Adlakha, a doctor and Chicago native who tried to unseat Hyde-Smith in the Republican primary, put out a campaign ad: between bites of hamburger, she says, “If I can’t afford beef, I should pick another protein?
Or we could pick another senator.”
The Colom campaign repurposed the bit. Colom’s identical twin, Andrew, helped write a script for a new ad. They shot it in Columbus and featured locals, including a white guy, grilling beef patties, who says, “Pick another protein? Shiiiiiiit, I’d rather pick another senator instead,” and an older Black woman, eating at a restaurant, who says, “Pick another protein?
She done lost her damn mind.” The ad—made in a few hours, for less than a thousand dollars—went viral. Then he said, “Y’all wanna go live at five with me on CNN?” The correspondent Annie Grayer was there, ready to do a standup. Albert Fujii, Colom’s comms director, had expected the standup but not the group invite. He turned to me and said, “We go with the flow around here.” As the firefighters followed Colom to the front of a parked fire engine, one called out, “When you get to Washington, don’t forget about the common people!”
Waiting for Jake Tapper to cue Grayer into his broadcast, Colom told her, “I’m glad you’re getting to see Mississippi.” They chatted about troubling anecdotes that they’d heard, involving voters’ experiences at the polls, and Colom said, “We have to make it easier for people to vote.” Mississippi puts up more barriers to voting than almost any other state—there’s no online voter registration, no Election Day registration, no early voting.
In March, Mississippi Today uncovered a new obstacle:
In March, Mississippi Today uncovered a new obstacle: the state has been vetting voter rolls using credit data from Experian, a consumer-reporting agency, which “guesses consumers’ possible addresses.” Experian’s own executives cautioned against using the data for election purposes, but the state carried on; some two hundred and thirty thousand voters, rendered “inactive,” vanished from precinct poll books, in part because of discrepancies in the data.
Those voters, on Election Day, could fill out a provisional ballot—called an affidavit ballot, in Mississippi—and track its progress on the secretary of state’s website. But scores of them learned that their ballot had been rejected, with little or no explanation. Colom told Grayer, “I hope the country’s starting to see why we can’t allow elected officials to use credit agencies to check the voter rolls.” Calling out Michael Watson, the secretary of state, he said, “This is the chaos that he created.
He needs to be answering some tough questions.” (On X, Watson said that he stands by “our decision and the work we’ve done to clean up our voter rolls.”)
Colom had his patter down by now. When Grayer asked him how he’d been able to win over voters, he replied it helped that Trump had “betrayed” them, saying, “He promised lower prices on Day One, and the exact opposite happened.
We had the highest increase in sales tax
We had the highest increase in sales tax on Day One, through tariffs. He promised no more endless wars. We’re back at war.” (The resulting higher diesel prices were hurting farmers and truckers.) “He promised there would be a full release of the Epstein files. Well, he did everything except fully release the Epstein files,” he went on, adding, “We’re dealing with record levels of corruption.” The people of Mississippi “stood up for themselves and said, ‘We want to go in a new direction.’ ”
Back in the S.U.V., Colom told me, “To do what it takes, to actually win, everybody in politics has to have a little bit of a selfish motivation.
I wanted Mississippi to get better representation, but my selfish motivation was I wanted to make my parents proud.” His parents, Dorothy and Wilbur, are both lawyers. His mother, a retired judge, was the first Black chancery-court judge elected in her four-county district, and has taught African American studies at Mississippi State, the alma mater of Gerard Henderson, Colom’s campaign manager.
Colom’s father goes by WOC, the initial letters of his full name, Wilbur O’Neal Colom. WOC, who is in his late seventies, is a former Republican and once worked on Ronald Reagan’s transition team. Colom introduced me to him at campaign headquarters, and we sat for a while, talking, as Colom, in the next room, appeared live on Chris Hayes’s show. When I asked WOC why he’d worked for Reagan, he grinned and said, “Thad Cochran talked me into it.” He was referring to the former longtime Republican senator from Mississippi, who, WOC recalled, had taken notice of his field-organizing skills.
I was always the most liberal guy
“I was always the most liberal guy in the Republican Party,” he told me, adding that “they never really seemed to care” about his politics, or his race. He used to tell his children, “Race is a first impression. They’ll have stereotypes about you when they first meet you, and then after they know something else, color falls to the side, because they’ve got too many other things to evaluate you on.”
I asked how else his children were raised.
“Daddy gives no false praise,” he replied. “They used to say I was the toughest man on earth.” Scott is the older twin, by seconds. As a youth, he was “the peacemaker,” and played basketball. Andrew, who was “the most political,” served as student-body president. Andrew went to Columbia; Scott, before attending law school at the University of Wisconsin, went to Millsaps, a private college in Jackson.
“He always wanted to be sort of close by,” WOC said. Campaign staffers were lurking, probably to make sure we weren’t gabbing about anything sensitive. But we were talking only about the Colom homestead (“We’ve been in the same place since the family was freed as slaves”); and polio (rolling up his pants, he showed me that his left leg is smaller than his right leg, and said that he contracted the disease in 1952, three years before a vaccine became available); and Falkner, Mississippi (good basketball, back in the day); and Ripley, Mississippi, where my dad once went looking for our family’s golden retriever because people who stole dogs were known to sell them at a popular flea market there.
WOC said, They’re probably from Biggersville. I spent
WOC said, “They’re probably from Biggersville.”
I spent much of Monday and Tuesday in Madison County, which includes prosperous suburbs just north of Jackson. In 2024, Trump won Madison by seventeen points, but Colom had a slender lead. The county seat is Canton, which has a picturesque town square where movies get made. When I was there, film crews were setting up for “Don’t Open the Door,” a horror movie starring Omar Benson Miller, Ron Livingston, and Beverly D’Angelo.
Five election commissioners, who are elected to four-year terms, were working next door to the shooting location, in a former Fred’s, a defunct regional discount chain and pharmacy. In their office suite—at the end of the one hall, past a Pepsi machine and shrink-wrapped towers of new license plates—someone had put up “QUIET ZONE” signs and cordons. A half-dozen election monitors were sitting or standing behind the cordons, silently recording the proceedings and making notes, as if studying creatures at a zoo.
The commissioners, sitting in pairs, were checking affidavit ballots against information on the screens of their Dell desktop computers, then running the ballots through tabletop scanners. The computers were arranged so that their audience could not see the screens, and the commissioners were speaking in voices too low for the monitors to hear. As I first walked in, just after eight in the morning on Monday, one monitor, Guy Gillespie, an attorney, was complaining to Spence Flatgard, a lawyer for Madison County who serves on Mississippi’s Judicial Election Oversight Committee, that the commissioners were violating state law.
Flatgard told Gillespie, We’re just going to have
Flatgard told Gillespie, “We’re just going to have to agree to disagree.” When Gillespie told him to “pray about it for a minute,” another monitor turned to me and said, “That’s so Mississippi.”
An election monitor named Janine was spending long days observing the commissioners work. “They’re not that computer-savvy, and any kind of disruption rattles them,” she whispered to me.
“I think the whole Experian thing is throwing them off.” One voter had just visited the office and learned that his vote would not count because he supposedly lived in California, she told me. “He said he’d never lived in California in his life.”
I eventually left, and when I came back Gillespie was stepping out, looking upset. “Something needs to be done,” he said.
“The election laws in the state have got to be changed.” Deborah Ellis, a retired commercial insurance agent, had just come to ask why her affidavit had been rejected. When she started to explain her situation to the commissioners, one of them shushed her. Ellis and I sat, chatting, on a bench in the corridor. She had on black pants, Hoka tennis shoes, and a patterned blue-and-white shirt, and she had gone to great trouble to be there—she was using a walker because she’s about to have spinal surgery.
I mean, I try to be involved,
“I mean, I try to be involved, and do my own research,” she told me. But this matter had flummoxed her. She said that she had gone to vote, on Election Day, at St. Joseph Catholic Church, her voting precinct for at least twenty-one years, and was told that she needed to be at a different precinct. This was news to her—she had received no letter about it. After filling out an affidavit ballot, she had “left, thinking it was handled,” she told me.
Yet the experience had left her so unsettled that she’d gone onto the secretary of state’s website, to make sure that her ballot was counted, and that was how she learned that it had been rejected. When I asked whom Ellis had voted for, she gently declined to say. I was trying to find Republicans who had flipped for Colom; Janine, the election monitor, happened to pass by, and both women said good luck with that.
Flippers were not likely to publicize their decision, especially in counties as historically red as Madison. Each county manages its own election process, following state law. The vibe varies from place to place. In Hinds, a deep-blue county that includes Jackson, and which would eventually secure Colom’s win, election commissioners were setting out aluminum trays of fried catfish and chicken wings drenched in an eye-watering hot sauce.
A commissioner named Kidada Brown, a retired high-school
A commissioner named Kidada Brown, a retired high-school government teacher, was listening to DJ Curt, on TikTok, and explaining the affidavit process to anyone who wanted to learn. She wore a high, braided bun, a pink jumpsuit, a cropped denim jacket, geometric hoops, and glasses, and was using a pink felt-tip pen to write her conclusions across each affidavit ballot—“Not Found,” “Accepted,” “Rejected”—after checking the written information against the state’s data on her computer.
“Look at that—we found her! There she go. She voted in the correct place. That’s it, that’s her, we gonna accept her,” she said, finishing one case. For another, she picked up the phone, called the voter, and told him, “We trying to do your affidavit. You got purged off the voter roll ’cause you ain’t voted since 2018.” She let him know that casting an affidavit ballot had put him right, and chided him to “go on and vote,” in the future.
During the call, Brown discovered that the man’s address had been misspelled in the state’s database. She corrected it and reiterated, “Whatever you do, I want you to vote!”
Taylor, the N.A.A.C.P. director, told me, “I think we could’ve got here before now, but it required investment.” Throughout the entire Senate campaign, ad spending in support of Colom totalled some four to five million dollars.
In Texas, another Democratic flip, spending for James Talarico
In Texas, another Democratic flip, spending for James Talarico neared a hundred and fifty million. “Scott Colom’s grit and grind won this race,” Taylor said. The win may loosen up more money for 2027, when Mississippi holds its next round of statewide elections. Taylor told me, “I wouldn’t mind getting a governor that I’m proud of.”
I first met Taylor in March of 2020, when I was covering a Biden campaign stop in Jackson; he invited me to Mississippi’s N.A.A.C.P.
headquarters, at the Masonic Temple, on John R. Lynch Street, a landmark of the civil-rights movement. Walking me into the auditorium where the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party held their state convention, in the summer of 1964, he said, “Just being in a space where folks struggled with our ideas, and at a time when it was dangerous to voice them—it’s almost like you can feel their prayers when we’re doing our daily work.”
His late grandfather, a judge in Yazoo County, used to say that a politician starts campaigning the day he is born.
“How you showed up before you decided to run will be foundational,” Taylor explained. In the Black community,“you get elected two ways.” One is long-term relationships. The other is what he calls the “trusted voice”—the one who says, “This is the person we think is best to represent our community. That’s the thing white liberals miss, especially those who are not from the South.
They underestimate us, and assume we’re not organized
They underestimate us, and assume we’re not organized in our community. Black communities have been organized since slavery.” Taylor’s grandfather also used to say, “You have to put your hands in the hands of the people.” This is what Colom did, up and down Mississippi. Colom received several thousand more votes than Kamala Harris did in the state, in 2024, despite the fact that turnout typically drops substantially in midterm elections.
Bennett-Scott, the Mississippi Votes organizer, told me that what “pushed it over the edge was Callais.” This spring, a landmark 6–3 U.S. Supreme Court decision, in Louisiana v. Callais, contributed to the ongoing erosion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by making it significantly easier for states to redraw district boundaries in a way that disadvantages voters of color. After the ruling, Tate Reeves, Mississippi’s Republican governor, announced his intention to end Thompson’s “reign of terror” in the Second District, an outcome that organizers are preparing to fight.
Suppressing the Black vote—and keeping people like Thompson, and now Colom, out of power—has historically been a significant part of Mississippi’s playbook. It is impossible to note this moment without remembering the Reverend George Lee, an N.A.A.C.P. branch co-founder who was assassinated after leading local voter-registration drives (Belzoni, Mississippi, 1955); Lamar Smith, a First World War veteran and voting-rights activist who was shot dead in broad daylight outside the Lincoln County Courthouse, after helping Black residents fill out absentee ballots (Brookhaven, Mississippi, 1955); Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan who was tortured and killed after supposedly whistling at a white woman (Money, Mississippi, 1955); Herbert Lee, an N.A.A.C.P.
Charter member and voter-registration activist who was shot
charter member and voter-registration activist who was shot and killed by a state lawmaker and member of the violently racist White Citizens’ Council while delivering cotton to a gin (Liberty, Mississippi, 1961); Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party co-founder who was beaten by law-enforcement officers after a voter-education workshop (Winona, Mississippi, 1963), and whose later declaration “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired” was a pivotal moment in the civil-rights movement; Medgar Evers, the state N.A.A.C.P.
field secretary (whose office Charles Taylor inhabits today), who was shot dead in his driveway, by the racist fertilizer salesman Byron De La Beckwith (Jackson, Mississippi, 1963); James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, Freedom Summer volunteers who were abducted and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan, including law-enforcement officers, while investigating the torching of a Black church (Philadelphia, Mississippi, 1964); Vernon Dahmer, the N.A.A.C.P.
president in Forrest County, who died after Klansmen firebombed his home and grocery store, following his public offer to pay poll taxes for anyone unable to afford them (Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 1966). Forrest County, in southern Mississippi, is named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, who founded the Klan. Colom flipped it. ♦
Source: www.newyorker.com
