Personal story time: Two years ago and some change, we were sitting on the plane from Atlanta to Milwaukee on our way to the 2024 Republican National Convention, and this woman walked by us. You know when you see somebody who’s moderately well-known in the wild, but they’re not a particularly interesting well-known person, not a compelling personality, so it takes your brain a minute to figure out where you’ve seen them? It was Cindy Hyde-Smith. It made sense. It was a Delta flight, and any flight from anywhere in the South to Milwaukee that day on Delta would have been routed through Atlanta. We had just come from Memphis. She probably started in Jackson.
Anyway, the only point of the story is that our current personal biggest regret in life is that God didn’t inveigh upon us to stop her in the aisle and say “Hey! You have no idea how much of a fucking loser you are going to be in November of 2026. And a really cool Black guy is gonna do it. One specific Black guy in particular who has a reason to hate your Meemaw ass.”
It would have been weird, admittedly, but we would have been correct, because with some county ballot drops from Mississippi last night, the magic numbers were hit that all the networks — first CNN, then everybody else — needed to see to declare that Mississippi had picked a new senator instead of a new protein, and his name was Scott Colom.
If only Cindy Hyde-Smith had not been such a dumb bigot!
If you haven’t heard the story 30 times already it goes like this:
President Joe Biden nominated wonderful and smart Scott Colom to a federal judgeship in 2023. Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker was fine with that, and as Charlotte Clymer notes, other veteran Mississippi Republicans like Haley Barbour and Phil Bryant were fine with it too. But Cindy Hyde-Smith, oh man she is a GRUNTING bigot, so she “blue slipped” Colom because she thought he was too nice to trans people, and also something something “George Soros.” She’s just stupid, stupid trash. Hit the link above, but that’s the CliffsNotes version.
So Mississippi didn’t get federal judge Scott Colom. Instead it got Senator Scott Colom, sitting in the seat Cindy Hyde-Smith is gonna need to go ahead and get her stupid bigot ass up and out of.
To be honest, even if Hyde-Smith hadn’t been a dumb bigot, she likely still would have lost to Scott Colom, because he’s such a great candidate, and he had that ad that will be studied for years in How To Make A Great Political Ad class.
Colom is the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction — 1881 to be specific — and the first Democrat since the late 1980s.
He was the right candidate, in the right state, at the right time. As we, your resident South explainer, wrote last week, Mississippi always was going to be the next in line (along with South Carolina), after Georgia and North Carolina and Texas started to move across the finish line.
Now it has a Black Democratic senator. Governor Tate Reeves is up for reelection next year. He only won in 2023 by three points. We are just saying.
Mississippi is almost 39 percent Black, and it’s the home of the most brutally racist voter suppression laws in the country. Those two things are related, and they mean that, as is so often the case, Black voters have to fight twice as hard, five times as hard, 10 times as hard to have equal representation, to be treated equally, to be treated like true citizens.
That’s why we’d like you to spend some time on Instagram or wherever you find new things, seeking out and absorbing some of the messages from Black Mississippians like author Kiese Laymon, as they bear witness to what this moment feels like for them. Laymon posted this excerpt from his memoir last night:
Now go read this from Jemar Tisby: “Why Scott Colom’s Victory Feels Like 145 Years of Blood, Tears, and Hope.” An excerpt:
It is a joy born of sorrow as we remember the legacy of our ancestors.
Those who lost their jobs or were even lynched because they dared to exercise their democratic rights.
This election is burdened with the memory of Medgar Evers, who was fatally shot in front of his home on a humid night in Jackson in June 1963.
His wife, Myrlie, and their children were inside.
It is a joy unspeakable because of the memory of Fannie Lou Hamer, who went to the Democratic National Convention in 1964 and testified about being tortured in a rural Mississippi jail, “All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens.”
It is a time inspired by scant but meaningful victories along the way, like Unita Blackwell becoming the first Black woman elected mayor in Mississippi in 1976 — the nation’s bicentennial.
It is an hour that recalls Freedom Summer 1964 when college students--most of them white--volunteered their summer to come down to the Mississippi Delta and help destitute sharecroppers register to vote.
Three volunteers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were murdered and buried in an earthen dam just for participating in that effort.
All this pain gives our joy its depth. And the joy gives the sacrifices renewed meaning.
You will read it all.
Last week, on election night, Hyde-Smith, Confederate pig bigot, stood up on stage and declared victory, bragging that she had blocked Scott Colom from a federal judgeship, and congratulated her followers for “block[ing] him from being a US senator.” Then she added some more pig trash racist words, saying that Ka-MA-la Harris learned a lesson” too, that “we may not quite enjoy her company in Mississippi.”
Have you ever encountered a white woman who looks and sounds more like she runs bake sales for the Ku Klux Klan?
We won’t be surprised if she has to fall back on something like that, since being a United States senator didn’t work out. We doubt Fox News is going to be banging down her doors or anything. (In case you are wondering, yes, she did concede.)
Here is Scott Colom’s victory speech. Don’t want that human skin tag above to have the last word in this post.
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"Have you ever encountered a white woman who looks and sounds more like she runs bake sales for the Ku Klux Klan?"
Nope.
I have a friend who lives in Juneau. She told me last night that Peltola may end up having the 50% needed to win outright. She thinks it could be called today or tomorrow.