By THT News Desk · Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026
The dawn has broken in Mississippi. Scott Colom, the district attorney from Columbus, has been elected to the United States Senate, defeating Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. The Associated Press called the race on Wednesday, more than a week after Election Day, once election officials finished counting absentee and affidavit ballots. Hyde-Smith called Colom Wednesday evening to concede.
With his win, Colom becomes the first Black American elected to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi since Reconstruction. The last was Blanche K. Bruce, who left office in 1881. Colom is also the first Democrat Mississippians have sent to the Senate since John Stennis in 1982.
The margin was razor thin: about 4,500 votes out of nearly one million cast, in a turnout that rivaled a presidential year.
“However long the night, the dawn will break.”African proverb
A long line of Mississippians
Colom now joins a long line of Mississippians who worked to make the state better for all its people. Hiram Revels became the first Black man to serve in the Senate in 1870, and Blanche K. Bruce followed in 1875. Then the Mississippi Plan of 1875, a campaign of terror and fraud, brought down Reconstruction in the state, and for nearly 150 years no Black Mississippian sat in the Senate. The struggle went on anyway, carried by people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers and the young organizers of Freedom Summer, who risked everything so that Mississippians could vote.
The voters who turned out this year finished a chapter that began with those people.
Who is Scott Colom?
Colom, 43, has served as district attorney for Mississippi’s 16th Circuit Court District, in the northeast of the state, since 2016. In 2023, President Joe Biden nominated him to the federal bench in northern Mississippi, but Hyde-Smith declined to return the “blue slip” the Senate traditionally requires, which stalled the nomination. Three years later, he ran against her and won.
He campaigned on lowering the cost of living, protecting rural hospitals and health coverage, and public safety, and he told voters that “Mississippi matters.”
Coming soon in New Voices: The Harlem Times has invited Senator-elect Colom to answer our questions in his own words for our New Voices series on the history-makers of Election 2026. Look for the interview here.
New Yorkers, and readers across the Harlems of the world, watched this count closely. As our publisher, Paul Jackson, wrote while the votes were still being tallied: “A new day may be upon us, a day when we, together as Americans, can heal past wounds and march forward to a brighter future.”
See every winner and history-maker of Election 2026 on our results page.
Sources: Associated Press, NPR, MS NOW, The Advocate, Democracy Docket, Mississippi Today, WLOX. Photo of Scott Colom: The Contrarian, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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