Scott Colom secured a historic Senate seat in Mississippi on Wednesday defeating Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith according to projections from CNN reported by corriere.it.
The 43-year-old Democratic candidate becomes the first African American to represent the state in the upper chamber of Congress since the late 19th century.
Colom breaks a 145-year absence of African American representation for Mississippi in the federal Senate. During the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, Hiram Rhodes Revels served from 1870 to 1871, followed by Blanche K. Bruce from 1875 to 1881, as corriere.it and il Giornale recorded. Both early senators were chosen by the state legislature before direct popular elections became standard.
No Democrat had won a Senate seat in Mississippi since John Stennis secured his final reelection in 1982, il Giornale and ANSA reported. The last new Democratic senator elected in the state dated back to 1947.
Raised in a conservative family by an attorney father and a judge mother, Colom launched his bid in September 2025, confronting long odds. Born in 1982 and raised in Columbus, Mississippi, his father Wilbur was a Republican who had worked for President Ronald Reagan and ran for state treasurer in 1987, while his mother Dorothy was a judge and the first African American woman elected to a court in her region. After graduating from Millsaps College, he studied law at the University of Wisconsin and specialized in jurisprudence, and spent 16 months working as an elementary school teacher in Guyana before returning home.
His early career in the judiciary began in 2011 when he became the youngest and first African American to serve as a local trial court judge in Lowndes County. He has served as district attorney for the 16th judicial district of Mississippi since 2016, after unseating a nearly thirty-year incumbent in 2015, and won reelection in 2019 and 2023, according to corriere.it records.
President Joe Biden previously nominated him for a federal judgeship for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi in 2022 and 2023, though that nomination was blocked by Cindy Hyde-Smith, as Il Messaggero detailed.
Campaign messaging focused heavily on everyday economic pressures, including grocery prices, wages, and the preservation of rural hospitals. Using the slogan “Mississippi Matters” (“Il Mississippi conta”), he maintained a long campaign across the territory through dialogue with voters far from major urban centers.
High-profile national figures including Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, and Senator Raphael Warnock supported his run, according to Il Messaggero reporting. Hyde-Smith, age 67, had been appointed to the Senate in 2018 by then-Republican governor Phil Bryant following the resignation of Thad Cochran, and campaigned alongside Donald Trump, who called her a “100% Maga” candidate.
Donald Trump won Mississippi by roughly 23 percentage points in 2024, according to corriere.it data.
He won election as district attorney for the 16th judicial district in 2015 and took office in 2016, as reported by corriere.it.
“In Mississippi nessuno è al di sopra della legge e nessuno dovrebbe essere escluso dalla sua protezione,” said Scott Colom, inviting voters to honor those who fought for voting rights.
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