Democrat Scott Colom has won the United States Senate race in Mississippi, defeating Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith in a result called on Wednesday after more than a week of counting, according to projections by the Associated Press, CNN and NBC News.
Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney, becomes the first Black senator from Mississippi since the Reconstruction era that followed the US Civil War, and the first Democrat to win one of the state’s Senate seats since John Stennis in 1982. With about 99 percent of the vote counted, he led Hyde-Smith by 49.2 percent to 48.7 percent, a margin of roughly 4,585 votes out of more than 950,000 cast.
Hyde-Smith, 67, who had held the seat since 2018, conceded in a video message posted on social media, congratulating Colom and saying she respected the decision of Mississippi voters. Colom’s campaign said she had also telephoned him to concede earlier in the day.
The result gives Democrats an eighth Senate seat flipped from Republicans in this year’s midterm elections, taking their tally in the 100-member chamber to 55 seats, made up of 53 Democrats plus two independents who caucus with them, against 44 for Republicans, with the race in Alaska still to be called.
The outcome was one of the last to be decided from the November 3 midterm elections, in which Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress, according to Reuters. The count in Mississippi dragged on for eight days as election workers tallied absentee and provisional ballots, with Colom’s lead growing steadily as the count went on.
The upset stunned political observers. Hyde-Smith had consistently led in opinion polls, and President Donald Trump had carried Mississippi by nearly 23 points in the 2024 election. Colom, a seventh-generation Mississippian, campaigned on the cost of living and health care for residents of the state. It was the closest Senate race in the country, according to the Associated Press, decided by just a few thousand votes after days of counting.
Colom celebrated the win on Wednesday night at Tougaloo College, a historically Black university, opening his victory address with a tribute to Hiram Revels, the first Black US senator, who also represented Mississippi. The state is due to certify the results on December 3.
