A Democratic district attorney is within striking distance of unseating a Republican incumbent in a state Donald Trump carried by more than 20 points — and the real story isn't the margin, it's the message. With roughly 96% of votes counted in Mississippi's Senate race, Democrat Scott Colom leads Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by roughly 1,100 votes, according to CBS News and the Associated Press. The BBC reported the gap as narrow as 65 votes at one point Wednesday. Either way, a race that should never have been competitive is heading for a days-long wait, with mail-in ballots still arriving under Mississippi's five-day receipt window.
This matters because Mississippi hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1982. If Colom holds on, he'd be the first black senator elected in the state since Reconstruction. The result isn't a Democratic masterstroke — it's a Republican failure. Hyde-Smith, appointed in 2018 and endorsed by Trump, ran what the BBC described as a "mostly lacklustre campaign, relying on the state's reliably conservative base to deliver." That base didn't show up the way it used to.
Colom, a 43-year-old seventh-generation Mississippian, kept it simple: cost of living, health care, and Christian faith. He also hit Trump on the war in Iran and rising prices. "The results are all trending in our direction," Colom told supporters early Wednesday. "We are trending in counties that people thought we had no chance to compete in. And we're winning them." The NAACP's Mississippi branch reported heavy black voter turnout, with director Charles Taylor telling the BBC: "Folks everywhere were motivated across the state."
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance took to X to blame the GOP's midterm losses on the war with Iran — prompting Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf to fire back: "Losing gambler energy... Boss is prepping the next war phase while America teeters on an Israel-First cliff. Skip the TED talk. Why not say this to your boss?" The Guardian highlighted the exchange; CBS and the BBC didn't touch it.
The broader picture: Democrats seized control of both chambers of Congress, flipping Senate seats in South Carolina, Texas, and Kansas — states that hadn't elected Democratic senators in decades. The Guardian framed it as a "historic blue wave" tied to reproductive rights ballot measures. That's part of it. Voters in Nevada and Virginia enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions; Missouri rejected a GOP-led repeal that would have also banned gender transition procedures for minors; Idaho kept its abortion ban. But reduce this to a single issue and you miss what's actually happening: Republican voters, asked to carry water for a party that keeps spending and warring, are starting to sit out.
Trump himself sensed the danger, campaigning for Hyde-Smith last month: "I just got to make sure. I can't take a chance." He was right to worry. The chance he couldn't take was that his own voters might finally demand delivery instead of slogans.
The race won't be called until at least November 10, when Mississippi finishes counting mail-in ballots. No automatic recount exists under state law. The question isn't whether Colom wins — it's whether Republican leadership learns anything from how close he came.
