I tried to tell you all. In January, I said on “The Weeknight” that Scott Colom could be a convincing candidate for the U.S. Senate. In August, when our list of 12 Senate races to watch left Mississippi off, I told viewers to pay attention anyway. I believed he could win.
Wednesday night, it became official: Colom defeated Cindy Hyde-Smith, becoming the first Black senator elected by Mississippi voters and the first Democrat the state has sent to the Senate since 1982. The last Black senators chosen to represent Mississippi, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, were selected during Reconstruction, a time when all U.S. senators were picked by state legislators and not voters.
In 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer went to the courthouse in Indianola to try to register to vote. The plantation owner she worked for told her to withdraw her application. She refused and lost her job. Two years later, she went to the Democratic National Convention to challenge an all-white delegation that claimed to represent Mississippi. Hamer understood that representation depended on who had the power to choose and that building that power took work.
People keep asking me what I saw in this race.
People keep asking me what I saw in this race. I saw a candidate who knew how to compete in Mississippi, and years of nonpartisan organizing that helped build an electorate ready to hear him.
Start with Colom himself. He had already won election as district attorney in a majority-white district and been re-elected twice. In 2022, President Joe Biden nominated him for a federal judgeship. Mississippi’s senior Republican senator, Roger Wicker, supported the nomination. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith used the Senate’s “blue slip” tradition to block it. This year, Colom asked Mississippians to send him to the Senate in her place.
When I asked Colom in July how he intended to win, he told me he was going after young people, people who had given up on politics and people who had voted Republican before. I took him seriously because he understood what it would take to get those people to hear him out. He held five town halls in five days. He went to Corinth and talked to people waiting in line to see President Donald Trump rally for his opponent.
When Colom came back on our show in October, he was still talking about what people were paying for groceries, gas and healthcare. When he talked about Medicaid and hospitals in the Delta, he was talking about whether people would be able to get care close to home. That was the campaign he ran. It gave people who might never have considered voting for him a reason to listen, and it gave people who were ready for a change a reason to turn out.
In August, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks became the first senator to campaign with him in Mississippi. As the campaign went on, Sens. Lisa Blunt Rochester, Cory Booker and Raphael Warnock, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and former Vice President Kamala Harris followed.
But the people of Mississippi believed first.
After Hurricane Katrina, Derrick Johnson, now president of the NAACP, founded One Voice, a Jackson-based nonprofit that trains Black Mississippians in civic engagement. It brought local leaders together and helped develop new ones. After Democrats lost the state House in 2011, Mississippi organizers kept building. Local groups used voter data to run their own canvassing operations and stay in touch with people between elections. They had their own relationships and their own reasons to knock on those doors.
In DeSoto County in 2019, Hester Jackson-McCray went looking for people who had just moved into her district and hadn’t registered, then went back to make sure they had turned in their paperwork. She became the first Black person to represent DeSoto County in the legislature. Some of that was nonpartisan organizing, and some was candidates like her doing it themselves. All of it was happening long before the national party had a Senate race to put money into.
When I said in March that Mississippi was no accident, I was thinking about two races for the state Senate. The Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP and Black voters had gone to court over maps that diluted Black voting strength. Under court-ordered maps, voters elected Theresa Gillespie Isom and Johnny DuPree. With those two seats, Republicans lost their supermajority. That was one reason I took Colom’s chances seriously. People in Mississippi had already fought for a fairer chance to choose who represented them, and when they got that chance, they used it.
Give the Democratic National Committee credit. It made a six-figure investment in the Mississippi Democratic Party’s organizing ahead of those 2025 special elections. I wish the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had shown that same confidence in this race. The DSCC announced a $500,000 coordinated ad buy only six days before Election Day.
Imagine celebrating the power of Black voters in Mississippi, then leaving them to defend it on their own.
Colom is going to Washington. The people who sent him there are still fighting over who gets to represent them at home. In May the Supreme Court set aside the ruling that produced those state Senate maps. Lawmakers have already held redistricting hearings, candidates start qualifying in January, and some Republicans are talking about carving up the majority-Black congressional district represented by Bennie Thompson, the only Black member of Mississippi’s U.S. House delegation. Imagine celebrating the power of Black voters in Mississippi this week, then leaving them to defend it on their own next week.
Next year, Mississippians will elect a new governor and members of both chambers of the Legislature. The national party and the outside groups that showed up in October have all the evidence they need. Put money behind the plans local organizations are already making for 2027, and give those organizations a permanent say in how it’s spent. If Mississippi Republicans can see enough power in these communities to want to divide them, national Democrats ought to see enough to invest in them.
But this was never the party’s story. It belongs to the young people Mississippi Votes brought into this election, many of them voting for the first time. It belongs to the Black women who have carried organizing in this state for generations, and to the canvassers who kept knocking on doors in the years when there was no Senate race to knock for.
In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer stood before the Democratic National Convention’s credentials committee and asked the country, “Is this America?” Sixty-two years later, Mississippians are still answering her. They didn’t wait for anyone to believe in them.
They believed first, and the rest of us are still catching up.
Evan Brechtel contributed to this report.
For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Symone Sanders Townsend and Luke Russert, watch “The Weeknight” every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW, and check out Symone’s podcast with Eugene Daniels, “Clock It.” Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
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