JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Democrat Scott Colom didn’t win Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race, but the local prosecutor was greeted as a historic figure Friday as he strolled through the Farish Street business district, where civil rights leaders once organized.
“It’s so wonderful! It’s so wonderful to have Scott Colom as our representative,” said Maati Jone Primm, owner of Marshall’s Music & Bookstore in Jackson.
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The state is still counting ballots that could make Colom the Deep South state’s first black senator since Reconstruction after the Civil War. The possibility of Colom defeating Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith places many black voters between cautious optimism and outright celebration in a state where nearly 40% of the population is black but the highest representation in generations is white.
“I’m so happy that we’ve gotten to the point where we are,” said Sorie Tarawally, a 76-year-old lawyer who has known Colom’s father for a long time. He called the 43-year-old candidate “the man, our messiah, our savior.”
The contest is still too early for The Associated Press to call, and Colom’s historic candidacy will hinge on a tedious process playing out at election offices in Mississippi’s 82 counties. Local officials receive and review absentee and provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots, before next week’s deadline. Volunteers and attorneys representing each campaign attend the event in anticipation of possible litigation.
Live results: Mississippi Senate midterm elections
“We are going to make sure that everything is done according to the law, and I have confidence in these local officials,” Colom said. “They are doing their job. You have to be patient with them.”
Colom said the votes recorded since Tuesday’s election were tilted in his favor, and he criticized Hyde-Smith for not explaining her strategy going forward.
“She’s still our senator. Where is she? Why isn’t she giving any interviews?” » asked Colom. “Why can’t she explain what her path to success is?”
Hyde-Smith has not appeared publicly since election night, when she essentially declared victory despite a razor-thin margin and ballots still uncounted.
“We are not going backwards,” she said Friday on social media. “This election is not over. Our team is working across Mississippi to monitor remaining ballots and protect the integrity of the process. We will make it through to the end!”
The precise number of outstanding ballots is not known
The pool of outstanding ballots includes mail-in ballots, which can be counted in Mississippi provided they are received Tuesday, five business days after the election. The others are affidavit ballots, which are dropped off at polling places if there is a problem: perhaps the person’s name was not on the lists or the person did not have proper identification, or an election official determined that the person’s identification did not precisely match the name on the list.
Citizens who have had identification issues have until Tuesday to resolve those issues in person at their local election office. For people who were not on a precinct’s rolls, local authorities can verify a person’s status using past records and information in the affidavit that person filed when filling out a ballot. This person generally has no responsibility to show up at a local election office; Ballot status can be found on the Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office website.
Counties have until Friday to certify the complete results to the secretary of state.
Mississippi law does not provide for a statewide recount. Campaigns could seek court orders, usually on a county-by-county basis, to review ballots.
Seismic effect would occur in Mississippi, not Washington
Democrats have already taken control of the Senate, so the outcome in Mississippi would not shift the balance of power in Washington.
But it would mark a seismic shift in the state, where white conservatives have dominated the Statehouse and congressional delegation for nearly 150 years. Through Jim Crow segregation and the civil rights era, these leaders were almost all Democrats. After the civil rights movement, they turned overwhelmingly to the Republicans. For black people in Mississippi, the result was the same: a lack of proportional representation at the highest levels of state government and in Washington.
Colom was initially considered a longshot candidate, and it wasn’t until late October that Senate Democrats’ main campaign group began spending on advertising to support him. But the midterm elections revealed a broad backlash against redistricting efforts in the South that aimed to strengthen Republicans and, by extension, reduce black representation.
The Primm Bookstore, where Colom visited Friday, opened in the 1930s and is recognized as the oldest black-owned bookstore in the United States.
She said the Farish Street neighborhood still represents “the first migration of black people in Mississippi, from the plantation to the city.” Having Colom as a potential senator “makes us so proud and it gives us someone to aspire to. Our young people need to see the possibilities available to them in their lives, and we will when we see our next senator from Mississippi.”
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During his campaign, Colom emphasized that he could represent all Mississippians, and he said President Donald Trump’s policies — the war with Iran and tariffs, in particular — cut across all demographic lines. He even celebrated the extension of the vote counting process as a benefit to the state’s 2.95 million residents.
“I’m so happy the national press gets to see the beauty of our state,” he said.
But Colom and his black supporters also never ignored the importance of his candidacy as a black man.
“We are motivated by the gross inequalities we have seen in society and the fact that only one side seems to benefit,” said Tarawally, who was born in Sierra Leone and came to the Deep South to study law at the University of Mississippi. “So we want a person who speaks to our advantage.”
Colom ended his campaign with an ad filmed at the Jackson home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was gunned down in 1963 in his own driveway, dying in front of his wife and children.
“It’s a powerful reminder of the sacrifice to get out the vote, and no one has sacrificed more than Medgar Evers and his family,” Colom said Friday.
“What was important to me about this ad is that we didn’t ask people to vote for me. We just talked about the sacrifice, talked about the story,” he continued. “We just wanted it to be the closing ad because I wanted it to be the last message that the people of Mississippi hear.”
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