Mississippi Senate election Scott Colom Democrat win, Digi Mart USA News (Mississippi): Democrat Scott Colom was humble in claiming victory late Wednesday night, seizing an eighth Senate seat from the Republicans, this one in the heart of the red South. “All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” he said.
“In the Mississippi, our prayers have often changed the course of history.”
Colom had not just changed history, he had defied it. Mississippi has a 36 per cent Black population, more than any other state.
The last time it had a Democratic senator, he was an ardent segregationist first elected in 1947, whom The Atlantic once described as “one of twentieth century America’s most admired white supremacists”.
The last time Mississippi had a Black senator, he was the son of a slave mother and a white planter, born 20 years before the start of the American Civil War. That man, Republican Blanche Bruce, spoke in the Senate against the “flagrant wrongs” that persisted in Mississippi, where Democrats coordinated efforts to suppress the Black vote.
More than 150 years later, the names of the parties have changed, but some of the tactics look familiar.
The Associated Press called the result for Colom, a 43-year-old former prosecutor and judge, on Wednesday night, more than a week after the election. AP put him ahead by 4,669 votes, or 0.5 per cent of the 962,237 counted.
Jubilant supporters gathered in Jackson, Mississippi, one of the most high-profile battlegrounds of the civil rights movement, where Black activists fought and some died for democracy.
The victory rally was held on the lawn outside Woodworth Chapel, a meeting ground for prominent civil rights leaders in the 1960s and 1970s, including Martin Luther King, Jr. “There were many times where I had to have faith,” Colom told supporters.
“There were times that I couldn’t get donors to answer the phone. They did not believe a moment like this was possible.
But I kept the faith.”
Mississippi has no recount law. The defeated Republican, Cindy Hyde-Smith, conceded on social media on Wednesday, saying: “While this is not the outcome we worked for or hoped for, I respect the decision of Mississippi voters.” In a twist of fate, Hyde-Smith had used her Senate powers in 2022 to block Colom’s nomination by President Joe Biden as a district court judge.
On election night, when she thought she had won, she had boasted to supporters, “I blocked Scott Colom from being a federal judge and you blocked him from being a U.S senator.”
Hyde-Smith said her team had worked to ensure every legal vote was counted and that it was a “fair and transparent” election. Campaign insiders put Colom’s victory mainly down to his relentless campaigning, which positioned him to attract high-profile Democratic support and fundraising late in the race, once the seat looked winnable.
Colom complained that analysts had rated the seat as solid Republican for most of the cycle, which made fundraising more difficult.
Eventually, support arrived from Kamala Harris, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pete Buttigieg and Bill Clinton, who chose Mississippi for one of his only two public campaign stops.
Barack Obama made an advertisement for him in the final stretch. After the result was declared, Clinton congratulated Colom on social media, writing, “We may have had to count One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, but Blue Mississippi sure has a nice ring to it!”
Voting rights issues shaped the race. A Jim Crow-era provision still imposes a lifetime voting ban for certain felony convictions, affecting nearly 70,000 people.
In August the Campaign Legal Center said a Republican-led mass closure of polling places particularly disadvantaged voters of colour and low-income voters. In April, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v Callais that the six Republican-appointed justices had removed what was left of federal protections for minority voters, which some critics described as the worst ruling in a century.
Shortly before the election, more than 230,000 voters were designated inactive following a mishandled attempt to “clean the rolls” the year before.
Professor D’Andra Orey of Jackson State University told the Pulitzer Center that the rolls issue and the redistricting inspired a surge in Black voter turnout. “Some people actually really literally thought that they were going to lose their right to vote, which then mobilized them to get out the vote,” he said.
Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said: “In a state that has witnessed some of the nation’s most difficult battles for voting rights, Black voters once again demonstrated the power of civic engagement and the strength of our democracy.” The Democrats have now won 55 Senate seats to the Republicans’ 44, with one seat, Alaska, yet to be called.
