Democrat Scott Colom Beats Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi, CNN Projects. AP Hasn’t Called It Yet.

Eight days after the polls closed, Mississippi finally has an answer, and it is one almost nobody in national politics saw coming a year ago. CNN’s Decision Desk projected Wednesday afternoon that Democrat Scott Colom has beaten Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, flipping a seat in a state President Trump carried by nearly 23 points in 2024.

The margin is thin. With about 99% of the vote counted, Colom led by roughly 4,600 votes, according to CNN’s numbers as reported by WLBT in Jackson. As of late Wednesday afternoon, the Associated Press still had not made its own call. Reuters and other outlets have since reported the CNN projection, but in a race this close, the official certification is what settles it, not the cable networks.

If the result holds, Colom, a 43-year-old local district attorney, becomes the first Democrat Mississippi has sent to the Senate since John Stennis won his last race in 1982. He would also be the first Black person elected statewide in Mississippi since Reconstruction, and the first Black senator from the state since Blanche K. Bruce, who was chosen in 1874.

A week of counting, one ballot at a time

This was never going to be a quick night. Colom led by a razor-thin margin in the days after the Nov. 3 election, and at points the gap was only a few dozen votes, Reuters reported. Local officials then had to vet thousands of provisional and affidavit ballots from an unusually high-turnout election, county by county.

That slow count became its own fight. Last week, Hyde-Smith’s lawyers asked all 82 counties to secure their affidavit ballots,. Tuesday was the last day for late-arriving mail ballots to count. By Wednesday, the remaining numbers simply ran out in Colom’s favor.

Hyde-Smith’s campaign account posted a short message shortly after the projection spread. It did not include a formal concession in its text, and it did not mention a recount.

How a Democrat won in Mississippi

Colom ran a campaign built almost entirely on grocery bills and gas prices. He tagged the incumbent “Cindy High Prices” and leaned on one of the most-shared ads of the cycle, which mocked a Hyde-Smith remark that there are “so many proteins to choose from” when she was asked about the cost of beef, CNN reported. In the ad, a woman tells the camera she would rather pick another senator.

He also did it the slow way. Colom told Reuters in an October interview that he spent the race at town halls, public housing complexes, festivals and food trucks. “We did it the hard way, the grassroots way,” he said. Late in the race, national Democrats piled in. Former Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned with him, and Democratic super PACs started spending on his behalf once the polls tightened.

Republicans did not take the seat for granted either. President Trump traveled to Mississippi near the end of the race to rally voters for Hyde-Smith, and she had led in nearly every public poll. That support kept the race close in a state where Republicans hold every statewide office. It just was not quite enough in a year when the national mood broke hard against the GOP.

The 2023 grudge

There is a personal history here that Mississippi political people have not forgotten. In 2023, then-President Joe Biden nominated Colom to be a federal district judge in north Mississippi. Hyde-Smith blocked the nomination, citing his positions on transgender issues, according to Reuters. Mississippi’s other Republican senator, Roger Wicker, supported Colom at the time.

So the man she kept off the federal bench will now, if the count holds, take her seat in the Senate. Colom has not made that the center of his message. Asked by CNN’s Laura Coates this week whether he was a bigger threat to Republicans than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as one Fox News host had suggested, he waved it off. “I’m not trying to be a threat to anybody,” he said. “I’m trying to focus on delivering for Mississippi.”

One more seat for the new majority

Democrats already won control of both chambers of Congress in last week’s elections. Mississippi was one of the last undecided Senate races in the country, and a Colom win adds one more seat to the incoming Democratic majority. That matters for things like how many votes Democratic leaders can afford to lose on a party-line bill, and how much room a few moderate Democrats have to break away.

It also matters for Republicans planning their way back. A seat this red does not usually come open again soon, and Colom will be on the ballot again in 2032. Republicans who want to win it back will argue that a one-point loss in a wave year says more about the year than about Mississippi. Democrats will argue the opposite: that a candidate who talks about prices, shows up in person and keeps national fights at arm’s length can win almost anywhere.

Certification, and a quiet incumbent

County results still have to be certified and sent to the Mississippi Secretary of State, and the state will make the result official after that. Hyde-Smith, who is 67 and was first elected in 2018, has not said publicly whether she will ask for a recount or contest any ballots. Her short post on Wednesday thanked voters and left it there.

For Colom, the work ahead is less glamorous than the win. He will join the Senate in January as a Democrat from one of the most conservative states in the country, with a voter base that just elected him by a hair. He told CNN the lesson was simple: “Mississippi matters.” He now has six years to prove it to the roughly half of his state that voted for someone else.