Colom Defeats Hyde-Smith, Breaks GOP's Senate Grip on Mississippi

Scott Colom has defeated Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi, NBC News projects, flipping the reddest Senate seat of this year's midterms and ending more than four decades of unbroken Republican control of the state's U.S. Senate delegation, according to NBC News.

Colom, a district attorney, will become Mississippi's first Black U.S. senator since the Reconstruction era, NBC News reported. He was born in 1982, just weeks after Mississippi last sent a Democrat to the Senate — a 44-year gap that made the state's seat the longest-standing Republican stronghold on this year's map.

How close was the vote count?

The race stayed unresolved for days after polls closed, with Colom holding what NBC News described as a razor-thin lead over Hyde-Smith as officials kept counting ballots. Colom projected confidence throughout the delay, according to the network's reporting, even as the margin stayed tight enough to keep the outcome in doubt.

What does the win mean for the Senate majority?

Colom's victory pushes the Democratic caucus to at least 55 seats, NBC News reported, with only Alaska's Senate race still uncalled nationally. In the new Congress, no Democratic senator will represent a redder state than Mississippi, which President Donald Trump carried by 23 points in 2024, according to NBC News.

Why does this flip matter for Mississippi's political history?

Mississippi has been a fixture of Republican Senate representation since 1982. Colom's win breaks that streak and lands in a state where Trump's 2024 margin was among his largest nationally — a contrast NBC News framed as evidence of the race's scale.

A rough timeline

• 1982: Mississippi last elects a Democrat to the U.S. Senate, the same year Colom is born.
• 2024: Trump carries Mississippi by 23 points, according to NBC News.
• Election night, 2026: Results remain too close to call as ballots continue to be counted.
• Nov. 11, 2026: NBC News projects Colom's win, pushing the Senate's Democratic caucus to at least 55 seats.

How did Mississippi voters view Trump's job performance?

A majority of Mississippi voters said they disapproved of Trump's overall job performance, according to NBC News exit polling cited in the network's report. Majorities also told exit pollsters that his policies, including tariffs, hurt the economy, and that they believed it was wrong for the United States to take a specific action the exit poll asked about — though NBC News's published account does not spell out the full wording of that question.

What happens next in the race count?

With Mississippi now called, Alaska remains the only outstanding Senate contest nationally, according to NBC News. Colom's win does not change the chamber's overall partisan trajectory on its own, but it removes one of the last uncalled races from a map that had been watched for whether Republican-leaning states would hold in a cycle marked by what NBC News's exit polling data showed was broad dissatisfaction with the president's performance, even in parts of the Deep South that voted for him decisively two years earlier.