On Wednesday night, eight days after the polls closed, the Associated Press called Mississippi's U.S. Senate race. Democrat Scott Colom beat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, 49.2% to 48.7%. He led by 4,645 votes Wednesday night, according to Mississippi Today, which notes the call was based on uncertified results. Hyde-Smith conceded that evening in a video: "I respect the decision of Mississippi voters."

This is a state President Trump won by 23 points two years ago, and where Republicans hold every statewide office. Colom will be the first Democrat Mississippi has elected to the U.S. Senate since 1982. He'll also be its first Black senator since Reconstruction.

The rest of Mississippi's Republicans in Congress held on, by a lot less than last time. And the people who run the state have said out loud what they plan to do next with the map.

Here's the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: Cindy Hyde-Smith is out

Hyde-Smith won this seat in 2020 with 54.1% of the vote. This year she got 48.7%. Going into election night, the Cook Political Report rated the race Likely Republican, NPR reported.

Colom ran on prices. He called her "Cindy High-Prices." Earlier this year, when Hyde-Smith was asked about high beef prices, she said "you have so many other proteins to choose from." She's a cattle rancher and a former state agriculture commissioner. Colom's answer was a viral ad full of Mississippians telling her to "pick another senator."

She also gave voters very little of herself. She hadn't debated an opponent since 2018 and refused to debate Colom. She wouldn't hold an open town hall, and in the Capitol she skipped the hallway interviews most members of Congress do. Even after the election, with the count still going, she held no public events in Mississippi. That week Colom held at least eight.

Then there's the reason Colom was running at all. In 2022 he was nominated to be a federal judge in north Mississippi, with support from both parties in Mississippi. Hyde-Smith blocked it single-handedly with the "blue slip", a Senate procedure a Mississippi segregationist invented to keep civil rights judges off the bench. Mississippi Today put it plainly: if she hadn't blocked him, he "likely would have served on the federal judiciary for the rest of his life and never run for the Senate."

Here's how Colom won:

• DeSoto County. The Memphis suburbs are usually safe Republican territory. Colom won DeSoto County by seven points, which Mississippi Today says Democrats "would have viewed as unthinkable last year."
• Seven Hyde-Smith counties flipped. Hyde-Smith carried DeSoto, Forrest, Madison, Lafayette, Grenada, Winston and Yalobusha in 2020. All seven were going for Colom in the count WLOX analyzed the day after the election. Her margin shrank in her strongholds too. In Harrison County on the Coast, her lead fell from about 17 points to about 4.
• Black voters turned out. Mississippi has the highest share of Black voters in the country, close to 40%. NPR said his win shows a shift across the South "driven by a surge of Black voter turnout."

DeSoto County also elected its first Black circuit and chancery judges. John Hughes won a circuit judgeship with 61% of the vote, and Gwen Baptist won a chancery judgeship with 51%. Both seats come from new majority-Black subdistricts the Legislature drew last year. A county supervisor and three other residents sued to stop those subdistricts from electing the judges, and in August a federal judge refused to stop them.

Baptist said her father and grandfather had to do their legal business outside the courthouse during Jim Crow. Now she'll be hearing cases inside it.

The bad: they won, by less

All three of Mississippi's Republican congressmen won again, and all three ran well behind where they finished two years ago. These are NBC News counts as of November 12.

• Trent Kelly won a seventh term in north Mississippi with 58.1%, down from 69.8% in 2024. He beat Cliff Johnson, a law professor at Ole Miss. Kelly's district includes DeSoto County, which Colom carried. His constituents have been asking him for a town hall since 2017, and by 2025 people were protesting outside his office every week.
• Michael Guest won a fifth term in central Mississippi with 57.4% over Michael Chiaradio, a farmer from Shubuta running for office for the first time. In 2024, Guest had no opponent at all. He ran what Mississippi Today called a "steady, low-profile campaign," including appearances with Hyde-Smith. Over the August recess he toured his district promoting a rural hospital fund. That fund was created by the same budget bill he voted for, the one that cuts billions from Mississippi Medicaid.
• Mike Ezell won a third term on the Gulf Coast with 60.9%, down from 73.9%. He beat Jeffrey Hulum III, a state representative who spent 22 years in the Army. Ezell is a former Jackson County sheriff. When ICE zip-tied two Hancock High students at a bus stop in Diamondhead, in his district, it was Mississippi's two senators who got them out. His office said it was "monitoring" the situation.

All three, along with Hyde-Smith, voted against extending the tax credits that kept Affordable Care Act plans affordable. When the credits ran out, Affordable Care Act enrollment in Mississippi fell by about 70,000 people.

The ugly: they're coming for Bennie Thompson's district

Mississippi sent one Democrat back to the House on Tuesday. Bennie Thompson has represented the 2nd District, which covers Jackson and the Delta, since 1993. He won again with 67.7%. He's the only Black member of Mississippi's delegation and the only Democrat.

Mississippi's Republican leaders have said they plan to make sure he can't win it again.

What the Supreme Court changed

Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state, about 38%. Even so, it has had few Black elected officials, Mississippi Today reports, "due largely to past gerrymandering and Jim Crow voting laws." The 2nd District has stayed majority Black through three rounds of redistricting.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. The ruling made it much harder to challenge a map under the Voting Rights Act. Within days, Mississippi Republicans started asking to get rid of his district:

• "It's time to erase Bennie Thompson's district," said state Sen. Kevin Blackwell of Southaven, part of the Senate leadership.
• "We need to eliminate Bennie Thompson's district and create a 4R-0D congressional map for Mississippi," said state Sen. Mike McLendon of Hernando.
• State Auditor Shad White, a potential candidate for governor, said lawmakers should redraw it too.

The way to do it, Mississippi Today explains, is to break the district up, mixing Black voters into the majority-white districts around it.

What the governor said

Gov. Tate Reeves called off a May special session that was only about the state Supreme Court map. He made clear the congressional map comes next. "It's not a question of if, [but] it's a question of when," he said. He also said "the tenure of Congressman Bennie Thompson reigning terror on the Second Congressional District is over." And: "No one is working closer with the White House on what the congressional maps in Mississippi look like than I am."

Primaries were already over by then, so the map couldn't change before this election. But the Legislature has set up special redistricting committees and held hearings around the state. In September, Mississippi Today reported that the new maps would likely pass in a special session after the midterms or in the regular session that starts in January.

What Tuesday showed

Tuesday showed what's at stake. The Black voters packed into Thompson's district are the same voters who just took a U.S. Senate seat away from Republicans. Thompson was a mentor to Colom, and Colom thanked him by name in his victory speech at Tougaloo College.

Republicans in Mississippi just lost a statewide race, the kind no district map can decide. The map they can still draw is the congressional one, and the goal their own state senator posted is four Republican seats and zero Democratic ones.

The rest of the ugly

A few more things from the last nine days:

• Bad credit-bureau data put voters on the inactive list. Secretary of State Michael Watson sent counties address lists from Experian, and eligible voters were marked inactive because of them. More than 230,000 voters were inactive by Election Day. Civil rights groups asked him to restore the wrongly flagged voters before the election, and state law allowed it, but he never answered. Those voters had to cast affidavit ballots, and some left the polls without voting.
• Then Hyde-Smith went after those same ballots. While she trailed, her lawyers demanded that all 82 counties keep every affidavit ballot separate, including accepted ones, as "potential evidence." Colom's lawyer said state law doesn't allow it and that it could tie a ballot to the voter who cast it. The state Republican chairman vowed to "fight like hell" and named heavily Democratic Hinds County as a likely target for a lawsuit. In the end, NPR reports, the race was decided after more than a week of counting absentee and affidavit ballots.
• A lawsuit to keep two Black judges off the bench. Robert Foster, a DeSoto County supervisor, sued after Callais to stop the new majority-Black subdistricts from electing the county's new judges. He argued that letting a small section of voters elect them discriminated against white residents. He lost, and the two Black candidates won.

What the results show

Scott Colom beat Cindy Hyde-Smith 49.2% to 48.7%, in a state Trump won by 23 points and where Hyde-Smith got 54.1% in 2020. He'll be Mississippi's first Democratic senator since 1982 and its first Black senator since Reconstruction. Trent Kelly fell from 69.8% to 58.1%, Mike Ezell from 73.9% to 60.9%, and Michael Guest, unopposed in 2024, won with 57.4%. Bennie Thompson won with 67.7%, and Gov. Tate Reeves and other Mississippi Republicans have said they plan to redraw his majority-Black district so he can't win it again.

Source

Democrat Scott Colom unseats Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in historic Mississippi US Senate race — Mississippi Today, November 11, 2026.