Could Mississippi Really Send a Democrat to the Senate?

Think about the races that are likely to determine control of the Senate in this year’s midterm elections. The chances are pretty high that the Mississippi Senate contest doesn’t feature on your list. After all, the last time the state sent a Democrat to the Senate was in 1982. But a growing number of observers on the ground in that deepest of Deep South states believe there’s more than a fighting chance that Democratic nominee Scott Colom, the district attorney for Mississippi’s 16th Circuit, could unseat sitting GOP Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Hyde-Smith, whose lead in recent polls ranges from 3 to 6 percent, has what critics might call “baggage.” In November 2018, she raised a storm of controversy by stating that if she were invited to a public hanging, she would want a front-row seat. In a state with an ugly history of racist mob killings, this was widely taken as a shout-out to vigilante lynching. More recently, Hyde-Smith has hailed both the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and the stampede toward mid-decade redistricting in the South, aimed largely at erasing Black-majority congressional districts. She has also been a particularly vociferous Trump supporter. She failed to stand up to Trump on tariffs, which have hit farmers in rural states such as Mississippi particularly hard, and she uttered not a peep of protest against last year’s “one big, beautiful bill,” even though the bill’s vast cuts to Medicaid and SNAP hit a poor state like Mississippi, which gets far more back in dollars from federal programs than it sends to DC in taxes, particularly hard. More than 100,000 of the state’s residents will lose Medicaid in the coming years because of the bill that Hyde-Smith voted for; tens of thousands of Mississippians will also lose their SNAP benefits, and hundreds of local grocery stores, reliant on income from customers using SNAP, will be put at risk of going under.

In fact, the only thing on which Hyde-Smith has distanced herself (albeit ever-so-mildly) from Trump is his recent decision to flood the beef market with imports of cheap beef—a move that, as a cattle farmer herself, Hyde-Smith knows is likely to hurt the American cattle industry.

Historically, Mississippi, whose population is roughly 37 percent African American, has been one of the most racially divided states in the country. For a hundred years after the Civil War, it was the epicenter of the Jim Crow South, and the Mississippi Democratic Party was a redoubt of segregationist white politics. In the civil rights era, as the national Democratic Party embraced the Voting Rights Act and other reforms that, cumulatively, dismantled the Jim Crow infrastructure, the parties flipped: Increasingly, whites in Mississippi aligned with a GOP that was veering ever more rightward, while the African American electorate moved into the Democratic Party’s camp. The divisions have remained so rigid in recent decades that, even as the African American electorate expanded, the white majority’s overwhelming adherence to the GOP ensured continued Republican dominance in statewide elections.

But the electoral math has been slowly changing in recent years. Since 2018, the size of GOP victories in statewide races has frequently shrunken to a few tens of thousands of votes. In 2023, incumbent Republican Governor Tate Reeves won reelection by only 27,000 votes—the state’s closest gubernatorial race since 1999. “We’ve been chipping away over the last more than half-decade,” Charles Taylor, executive director of the Mississippi NAACP, told The Nation. “Mississippians are fed up. That’s going to translate at the ballot box. There’s a lot of voter education going on. Voters in Mississippi and across the country are seeing the midterm elections as an existential crisis.”

In an election year in which many GOP voters are increasingly uncomfortable with the country’s direction under Trump, and with African American voters hyper-motivated to vote in the wake of the recent assaults on voting rights from the Supreme Court and a string of Southern state legislatures, Democrats have an opportunity to over-perform in the November Senate election. “We have a fighting chance here,” says Taylor. “And the country will be surprised by what happens.”

In a year with high African American voter participation—Democratic turnout in the 2026 primary was up 90 percent compared with the previous electoral cycle—only 20 percent of white voters would need to vote for Colom for the Democrat to flip the Senate seat. Given the conservative bent of white Mississippians, it’s still a long shot, but certainly not an impossibility. “There are a lot of social justice and civil rights [themes] bubbling up in Mississippi and throughout the South, and one of those has to do with what the US Supreme Court did,” Mississippi-based civil rights attorney Carroll Rhodes explained. “There’s a lot of hostility and anger and angst—and motivation within the African American community to vote and not to lose their right to vote. There’s probably going to be a bigger turnout than usual.”

“The demographics have been trending in this direction,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, told The Nation. “The current economic climate and restlessness with policies that have not worked, all of those things—people see it is possible to win a statewide race.” For Johnson, the confluence of national and state issues represents a potential tipping point for Mississippi. “Any candidate that speaks up to an administration in this moment who are taking resources out of Mississippians’ pockets will do well. The quality of life for Mississippians is not improving. We don’t have a single Fortune 500 company headquartered in this state. People are looking for a change.”

Colom, an African American attorney whose mother was a judge and father was a Republican who worked for Ronald Reagan, believes he can tap into that desire for a new politics. “We’re a state that can’t afford the corruption we’re seeing in DC right now,” he told The Nation. “Our farmers are already starting to feel the tariffs; fertilizer prices are spiking because of the war in Iran; and now the president is importing cheap beef. To me, what’s happened is a betrayal. They told the farmers, ‘We’re taking your votes for granted.’ It’s so stark, and the betrayal is so personal.”

Colom believes that in the lead-up to the election he can erase Hyde-Smith’s small but persistent lead in the polls. “A lot of people are going to be surprised,” he said. “But I’m not going to be surprised, and a lot of people in Mississippi won’t be surprised. You defeat the corruption by showing up and using your power in a moment when they’re trying to take it away.”