UPDATED: Democrat Scott Colom will win the U.S. Senate race in Mississippi, in what may be the biggest upset of the 2026 midterms.
Colom would be the first Black person elected to the Senate from Mississippi since Reconstruction. CNN projected Colom the winner, and the AP followed about an hour later.
Networks have been closely watching the vote count in the state for the past week, with a vote drop on Wednesday afternoon showing he led Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by more than 4,500 votes, per the AP.
On CNN, Jake Tapper played a portion of Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn,” telling viewers, “they keep on saying, ‘Go slow, go slow.’ Nina Simone wrote that in 1963. Here we are now, in the year of our Lord in 2026.”
Tapper said, “It’s not as though racism or the impacts of oppression have completely dissipated from the state. That ignorance remains. The pain is still evident. … And yet, right now, in the very same state of Mississippi, something remarkable has just happened. Voters, white, black, all other colors, are sending a black man into the United States Senate to represent all their interests.”
Watch on Deadline
Colom would be the first Democratic senator from Mississippi since John Stennis, a segregationist, who retired in 1989.
The state had drawn relatively little media attention and, even well into election night, was still pegged as “likely Republican” even as votes were being tallied. One other race, for U.S. Senate in Alaska, has yet to be called, but Democrat Mary Peltola is leading incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (D-AK). If she wins, Democrats stand to hold 56 seats in the Senate to Republican’s 44, flipping nine seats.
