Scott Colom’s Senate Win Is a Mississippi Miracle

Résumé détaillé

The most shocking flip of the Democrats’ blue-tsunami midterms is Scott Colom’s defeat of Cindy Hyde-Smith, making him Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction.

Late on Election Day, as Democrats routed G.O.P. candidates nationwide, winning control of both chambers of Congress, Mike Hurst, the chair of the Mississippi Republican Party, watched votes mount for his state’s Democratic contender for Senate, Scott Colom, a forty-three-year-old district attorney. At 11:30 P.M., Colom trailed the Republican incumbent by less than a point. Hurst remained confident. Mississippi had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1982—and had not seated a Black senator for more than a century before that. An incumbent had not lost a Senate seat since the nineteen-forties.

At the end of the night, though, Colom was up by twenty-eight votes. In the days that followed, as absentee and provisional ballots were processed, his lead crept past a thousand, then two, then four. On Wednesday, eight days after the election, Colom led by nearly five thousand votes, a wider margin than Hyde-Smith could overcome, and she conceded.

A victory rally was quickly arranged at Tougaloo College, in Jackson, the capital, where Colom and his campaign staff had been operating out of the former headquarters of the Mississippi Democratic Party. A berobed choir assembled. Supporters waved placards that read “SENATOR-ELECT SCOTT COLOM.” Bennie Thompson, who has long been Mississippi’s lone Black congressman, took the stage and noted how fitting it was to be celebrating at Tougaloo, a “safe haven for people who wanted to do right” and to “make this state a better place.” (Tougaloo was founded, in 1869, by Christian missionaries with the goal of educating freed slaves.) “All my friends kept saying, ‘I don’t know if the time is right.

Only two Black senators had ever served Mississippi: Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce. Both were sent to Washington, D.C., during Reconstruction, by the state legislature. This makes Colom the first Black senator ever elected by the people. “All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” he said at the victory rally.

Début de l'article, extrait de The New Yorker. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.