AP (“Mississippi elects Democrat Scott Colom as state’s first Black US senator since Reconstruction“):
Democratic nominee Scott Colom defeated Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith on Wednesday in Mississippi’s closely contested U.S. Senate race after a prolonged ballot counting process, giving the state its first Black U.S. senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction.
Colom’s narrow victory is a seismic shift in Mississippi, which has been controlled mostly by white conservatives for generations despite having the largest share of Black residents of any U.S. state. The outcome adds to a decisive midterm rebuke of President Donald Trump, whose party suffered defeats in several Republican-controlled states, and it will bolster some Democrats’ argument that their future runs through the American South.
“All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” Colom told a crowd of hundreds who gathered at Tougaloo College for his victory party. “I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we can show the country that Mississippi matters.”
The Associated Press called the race in Colom’s favor after local officials spent several days processing absentee and provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots in Mississippi.
The last time Mississippi chose a new Democratic senator was 1947; the winner was a staunch segregationist. Colom, a 43-year-old local prosecutor, capitalized on the state’s large Black population, discontent with the economy and Hyde-Smith’s missteps as she sought a second full term.
“They actually deserve a senator that will listen to them, that actually cares about what they think, actually cares about what they’re going through,” Colom said in the campaign’s closing stretch.
Hyde-Smith, 67, called Colom late Wednesday afternoon to concede and released a concession speech online shortly afterward.
[…]
The senator-elect concluded his campaign with an ad that featured him at the Jackson home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who, in 1963, was gunned down in his driveway by a white supremacist.
Colom told the story of Evers’ military service at Normandy in World War II, his voter registration efforts in Mississippi, his assassination and the three decades it took to win a conviction. “He was killed for helping Mississippians vote,” Colom said. “On Tuesday, use your vote and honor everyone who died for that right.”
At the lectern Wednesday night, Colom said it was appropriate that the race be called on Veterans Day, as he again paid tribute to Evers.
“He served his country, came home to Mississippi, and they wouldn’t let him vote,” Colom said. “But he had faith that Mississippi could make progress.”
NYT (“Long Before Scott Colom, There Were Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce“) adds some historical perspective:
With the race called in his favor on Wednesday, Scott Colom will become the third Black senator in Mississippi history, but the first in nearly 150 years. That legacy traces back to Feb. 25, 1870, when Hiram Revels walked into the chamber of the U.S. Senate to take his oath of office.
The month before, the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified, giving Black men like Mr. Revels the right to vote in a nation that had been ravaged by the Civil War. Mr. Revels, a man born free in North Carolina who served as a Union Army chaplain in Mississippi, had been chosen by the Mississippi Legislature to be its first new senator after the Civil War.
[…]
Mr. Revels was joined soon after in the Senate by Blanche K. Bruce, who was born into slavery in Virginia and fled to freedom at the start of the Civil War. He became the first Black man to serve a full term in the Senate.
That’s how historic this outcome is: Mississippi’s last Black senator was a former slave. That Mississippi not only elected a Democrat (the first since John Stennis, elected in 1947 and serving until his retirement in 1989) but a Black man is quite possibly the biggest indicator yet of the size of the blue tsunami.
To the extent the election was mostly a repudiation of President Trump, especially the economic damage done by his tariffs and war in Iran, it’s too early to say that we’re at the beginning of a realignment. But as Georgia has shown, electing a Democrat to the Senate—especially to a full six-year term—opens up the possibility of doing so again. Colom turns 44 on Christmas Eve, so he potentially has many terms ahead of him. (Indeed, he’s two years younger than Stennis was when he was first elected.) From here on out, he’ll campaign as Senator Colom with the incumbency advantage that comes along with it.
