For generations, the national political class has told one story about Mississippi: it is a lost cause, a place Democrats visit for anniversaries and leave before the polls close. Scott Colom just ended that story. It was always an alibi.
Start with the history, because it is the point. Mississippi is the state with the largest Black share of its population in America, and until now it had not sent a Black senator to Washington since Reconstruction, when the state legislature, not voters, picked Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce. Think about what that means. A state that is roughly 38 percent Black went more than 150 years without one of its own voters putting a Black person in that office. That is not an accident of taste. It is the product of intimidation, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and a politics built to keep the majority of one party's natural coalition from converting numbers into power.
It is also worth remembering who Colom beat. Cindy Hyde-Smith won her seat in 2018 after joking about attending "a public hanging," in Mississippi, in a runoff against Mike Espy, a Black Democrat. She was rewarded for it. Eight years later, Mississippi voters have answered.
But the lazy lesson would be "demographics are destiny." Mississippi Democrats have heard that for decades, and it kept getting them nowhere. Colom's campaign did not run on abstractions. It ran on wages, rural hospitals and the cost of living. That is a better lesson, and a harder one for my own party. The Mississippi economy is not an issue; it is an emergency. Hospitals in small towns are fighting to stay open. Paychecks do not stretch. When groceries cost more, people notice who in Washington shrugs. Hyde-Smith's remarks about beef prices gave Colom's side an opening, and a 27-year-old Mississippi content creator, Ryan Sayles, turned it into an ad that spoke in local language about local people. Not a consultant's poll-tested hymn to "working families." Something that sounded like home.
That should be humbling for Democratic strategists who spend fortunes on messaging that only reads in Georgetown. The party's Mississippi problem was never just that voters were unreachable. It was that the party mostly didn't reach. It parachuted in late, spent where the cable-news map told it to, and treated the Deep South as a rounding error. Colom, a local prosecutor who stayed and built a name in his own community, shows the alternative: credible messengers, kitchen-table stakes, and the dignity of being asked for your vote.
Republicans will say this is a fluke, a candidate-specific upset, or a rebuke of one incumbent. Maybe some of it is. A single election does not reorder a state. But they should explain why a party that claims to speak for working people has presided over hospitals closing and prices climbing, and why the people hurting in those places might be open to someone who says the problem is real. "Cultural grievance" can carry a campaign only until the emergency room shuts down.
The Left has its own test now. Symbolism matters; this election is historic, and no one should be coy about that. But Colom's voters did not send him to Washington to be a milestone. They sent him to get hospitals funded, wages raised and costs down. If Democrats treat this as a feel-good headline and then abandon the work, we will have proved the cynics right.
Mississippi is not a lost cause. It was a neglected one. Democrats should never make that mistake again, and neither should anyone who thinks the South's voters are only a map color.
