Democrat Scott Colom hasn't won Mississippi's U.S. Senate race, but the local prosecutor was welcomed as a historic figure Friday as he strolled through the Farish Street business district where civil rights leaders once organized.
"It's so wonderful! It's so wonderful to have Scott Colom as our representative," said Maati Jone Primm, who owns Marshall's Music & Bookstore in Jackson.
The state is still tallying ballots that could make Colom the first Black senator from this Deep South state since post-Civil War Reconstruction. The possibility of Colom defeating Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith puts many Black voters somewhere between cautious optimism and outright celebration in a state where nearly 40% of the population is Black but the top representation for generations has been white.
"I'm so glad we are at the point where we are," said Sorie Tarawally, a 76-year-old attorney who has long known Colom's father. He called the 43-year-old candidate "the man, our messiah, our savior."
The contest remains too early for The Associated Press to call, and Colom's historic bid will hinge on a tedious process playing out in election offices across Mississippi's 82 counties. Local officials are receiving and examining absentee and provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots, before next week's deadlines. Volunteers and lawyers representing each campaign look on in anticipation of potential litigation.
"We're going to make sure everything is followed according to the law, and I have confidence in those local officials," Colom said. "They're doing their jobs. Got to be patient with them."
Colom said ballots tallied since Tuesday's election lean in his favor, and he chided Hyde-Smith for not explaining her strategy going forward.
"She's still our senator. Where is she? Why is she not doing any interviews?" Colom asked. "Why can't she explain what her pathway to success is?"
Hyde-Smith has not appeared publicly since election night, when she essentially declared victory despite a razor-thin margin with ballots still uncounted.
"We are not backing down," she posted on social media Friday. "This election is not over. Our team is working across Mississippi to monitor the remaining ballots and protect the integrity of the process. We will see this through to the very end!"
Maryland Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, the first Democratic senator to campaign with Colom this year, said in an interview that she came away from her trip knowing that voters "would be really energized by a candidate like Scott." But Alsobrooks, who is her state's first Black senator, added that "the takeaway I had when I visited Mississippi was that there was a belief problem" after years of defeats.
"They now know that their vote matters," she said.
The pool of outstanding ballots includes absentee ballots, which Mississippi can count as long as they are received by Tuesday, five business days after the election. The rest are affidavit ballots, which are cast at the polls when there's a glitch: Perhaps the person's name was not on the rolls or the person did not have proper identification, or a poll worker determined the person's identification did not precisely match the name on the list.
Citizens with identification issues have until Tuesday to address them in person at their local elections office. For people who were not on a precinct's rolls, local officials can verify a person's status using previous records and information on the affidavit that person filed when filling out a ballot. That person typically has no responsibility to come to a local elections office; ballot status can be found on the Mississippi secretary of state's office website.
Counties have until Friday to certify complete results to the secretary of state.
Mississippi law has no provision for a statewide recount. Campaigns could seek court orders, usually county by county, seeking to examine ballots.
Democrats already control the Senate, so the result in Mississippi would not change the balance of power in Washington.
But it would mark a seismic shift in the state, where white conservatives have dominated the Statehouse and congressional delegation for nearly 150 years. Through Jim Crow segregation and the Civil Rights era, those leaders were nearly all Democrats. After the Civil Rights Movement, they overwhelmingly shifted to the Republican Party. For Black Mississippians, the result was the same: a lack of proportional representation at the top levels of state government and in Washington.
Colom was initially viewed as a long shot, and it wasn't until late October that Senate Democrats' top campaign group started spending on advertising to support him. But the midterms revealed a broad backlash against redistricting efforts in the South that were aimed at boosting Republicans and, by extension, reducing Black representation.
Primm's bookstore, where Colom visited on Friday, opened in the 1930s and is recognized as the oldest Black-owned bookstore in the U.S.
She said the Farish Street neighborhood still represents Black Mississippians' "first migration, from the plantation to the city." Having Colom there as a potential senator "makes us so proud, and it gives us someone to aspire to. Our youth need to see the possibilities for their lives, and we do when we see our next senator from Mississippi."
As he campaigned, Colom emphasized that he can represent all Mississippians, and he said President Donald Trump's policies — the war with Iran and tariffs, especially — cut across all demographic lines. He even celebrated the extended ballot counting process as a benefit to the state's 2.95 million residents.
"I'm so glad the national press is getting to see the beauty of our state," he said.
But Colom and his Black supporters also have never ignored the significance of his candidacy as a Black man.
"We are motivated by the gross inequalities we have seen in society and how only one side seems to benefit," said Tarawally, who was born in Sierra Leone and arrived in the Deep South to attend law school at the University of Mississippi. "So, we want a person who speaks to our benefit."
Colom ended his campaign with an ad set at the Jackson home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was gunned down in 1963 in his own driveway, dying in front of his wife and children.
"It's a powerful reminder of the sacrifice to gain the ballot, and nobody sacrificed more than Medgar Evers and his family," Colom said Friday.
"What was important to me about that ad is we didn't ask people to vote for me. We just talked about the sacrifice, talked about the story," he continued. "We just wanted that to be the closing ad because I wanted that to be the last message that the people of Mississippi heard."
