Democrat Scott Colom has won the United States Senate race in Mississippi, defeating Republican incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Associated Press called the race on Wednesday, 11 November 2026, after more than a week of counting.
Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney, will become Mississippi’s first Black senator in more than 140 years — the first since Blanche K. Bruce, who was born into slavery and served in 1881 — and the first Democrat to win one of the state’s Senate seats since John Stennis in 1982.
CNN projected Colom the winner with about 99 percent of the vote counted, leading Hyde-Smith by 49.2 percent to 48.7 percent, a margin of 4,585 votes. The contest was too close to call for more than a week as election officials counted more than 100,000 mail-in ballots, along with provisional ballots from voters who could not confirm their registration at polling sites.
The win is the eighth US Senate seat Democrats have flipped from Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections, giving the party a 55-seat majority in the 100-member Senate, with the race in Alaska still undecided. The 120th Congress will include a record seven Black senators.
The result is one of the midterms’ biggest upsets: Mississippi is a Republican stronghold that President Donald Trump won by just over 22 points in the 2024 presidential election. Colom campaigned on raising the minimum wage and increasing protections for rural hospitals, and he will be sworn in next January.
Source: Al Jazeera — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/11/democrat-scott-colom-wins-closely-watched-us-senate-race-in-mississippi
