How Mississippi Reached the Verge of Electing a Black Senator (Campbell Robertson & Emily Cochrane, NY Times, November 8, 2026)

From The New York Times:

The echoes of history surround Scott Colom’s final push toward victory, but assembling the coalition that propelled him took hard work after many Democratic misses.

Listen · 10:04 min

Scott Colom, a gregarious district attorney from Columbus, Miss., could become the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.Credit...Rory Doyle for The New York Times

By Campbell Robertson and Emily Cochrane

Campbell Robertson reported from Jackson and Meridian, Miss. Emily Cochrane reported from Nashville.

Nov. 8, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET

On Tuesday morning, Angela Lewis got off her overnight shift as a psychiatric nurse, drove to her polling place in Meridian, Miss., and then sat in the parking lot and prayed.

That morning, she asked that God’s will be done; the day before, she said a prayer of thanks to her father, James Chaney, one of the three civil rights organizers murdered by Mississippi Klansmen in June 1964, days after she was born. It is because of people like her father that she could vote at all.

The man she had come to vote for on Tuesday was Scott Colom, who now appears to be edging toward becoming the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Image

Among Mr. Colom’s supporters, the prevailing sentiment is that a Black Democrat’s victory was simply a matter of time.Credit...Rory Doyle for The New York Times

“I called all my kids,” Ms. Lewis said, “and I told them that if they love me and if they ever want to talk to me again, they better get out of that bed in the morning and they better go vote.”

They did, as did hundreds of thousands of Black voters, white voters, enthusiastic college students, angry suburbanites and discontented small-town conservatives, an unparalleled coalition that has put Mississippi on the cusp of history. If he wins, Mr. Colom will take the seat once held by Hiram Revels, the nation’s first Black senator, who was elected in 1870, the middle of the Reconstruction era.

The last Black senator from Mississippi, Blanche K. Bruce, served from 1875 to 1881, as Reconstruction was in its final days, raising alarms about the violence faced by Black voters but expressing his confidence “in the endurance, capacity and destiny of my people.”

On Saturday morning, more than 145 years after Mr. Bruce left office, Mr. Colom, 43, a gregarious district attorney from Columbus, Miss., was ahead by more than 2,500 votes, a margin that many believed would hold or even grow given the areas where uncounted votes still remain. His Republican opponent, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, 67, has insisted that she will prevail, and armies of lawyers have flown into Mississippi to monitor the vote count. The deadline for certification to the state is Friday.

“We are not backing down,” Ms. Hyde-Smith said last week on her campaign social media accounts. “This election is not over.”

The circumstances behind Mr. Colom’s electoral performance may be a combination of hard work and luck, a skilled candidate running a sharp campaign at just the right time. But history hangs heavy in Mississippi, and the significance is profound. The huge Black turnout this year was in part a reaction to efforts in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South to redraw district lines that would cut up majority-Black seats in Congress and in state legislatures.

Among Mr. Colom’s supporters, the prevailing sentiment is that a Black Democrat’s victory was simply a matter of time. What seems so astounding to outsiders is seen by many here as a math problem that has finally been solved.

Mr. Colom said early in his campaign that he knew he had “to get young people to care about this election.”Credit...Rory Doyle for The New York Times

“It was coming,” said N’spire Walker, 39, a middle school science teacher in Meridian, Miss. She was not sure if this was going to be the year until the evening before the election, she said, when she went to a rally for Mr. Colom and couldn’t tell if there were more white people or Black people.

“That’s when I knew,” she said.

Mississippi’s political math is not complicated. The state’s Black population, which overwhelmingly votes Democratic, is around 37 percent, the largest proportion of any state, so a Democratic candidate running statewide has a high floor. But with a white population that is overwhelmingly Republican, the ceiling for a Democrat is not far from that floor. In 2008, Barack Obama’s first campaign saw a record turnout of Black voters, and he drew 43 percent of the vote.

Image