Washington: Democrat Scott Colom will be the next US senator for Mississippi, flipping a traditionally deep-red state and becoming the first black man to hold that office since the aftermath of the Civil War more than 150 years ago.
After a count that took more than a week, the Associated Press declared Colom the winner at 6pm Wednesday (10am Thursday, AEDT).
He defeated incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, and delivered the Democrats an eighth new seat in the 100-seat Senate to increase the party’s total to 55.
Colom was considered an outside chance weeks ago, being several points behind Hyde-Smith in the polls, but became more of a dark horse as the campaign went on.
Asked about beef prices in a television interview in February, Hyde-Smith said: “You know, you have so many proteins to choose from.”
Colom’s campaign turned that into a viral ad featuring a man with a southern drawl cooking on the barbecue. “Pick another protein?” he asks. “Shiiii ... I’d rather pick another senator instead.”
The result in Mississippi not only caps a dramatic national blue wave with generational impact on US politics, but marks a historic moment for the Deep South state.
The last Democrat elected to the US Senate from Mississippi was John Stennis, who served from 1947 to 1989 and was elected for the final time in 1982.
Like other Democrats at the time, Stennis was an avowed racial segregationist for most of his career, though he supported an extension of the Voting Rights Act in the 1980s.
Mississippi sent two black men to the US Senate in the 1870s, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. Both were Republicans and elected by the state legislature, not the public.
Civil rights activist Flonzie Brown-Wright, who in the 1960s became the first black woman elected to public office in Mississippi since the Reconstruction, told The Financial Times last week : “It just feels like our time has come.”
Colom’s victory adds to a haul of Democratic wins in the Deep South, including Annie Andrews, who defeated Darline Graham for the Senate seat in South Carolina, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the new governor of Georgia, who also became the first black woman elected governor of a US state.
In Louisiana, another deep red Southern state, the Democratic Senate candidate came within two percentage points of victory. Democrats also had rare wins in Texas, Kansas and Iowa, among other states.
Hyde-Smith was initially elected to the Mississippi state senate as a conservative Democrat, before switching parties. In 2018, she filled a vacancy in the US Senate and was re-elected in 2020.
Last week, on election night, Hyde-Smith appeared to pre-emptively declare victory, despite also saying that it remained too close to call.
“I blocked Scott Colom from being a federal judge, and you blocked him from being a US senator,” she told her election night function.
“We still don’t have all the votes in, so we’re not calling all of it tonight, but we are in a very good lead – and I assure you, I will continue to be your US senator.”
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