Colom edges ahead in Mississippi as Hyde-Smith stays quiet

Hyde-Smith stayed out of sight for most of the race, and she's barely surfaced since. In a Capitol hallway Tuesday she offered only a few words: the votes were still being counted and a few thousand were outstanding, and she said, 'We feel confident.' She declined to detail where she saw a path to victory. Colom is ahead by a couple thousand votes.

The Democrat's closing argument played out on familiar ground — the floor of his old high school gym in Columbus, where Kamala Harris stumped for him in front of about 1,000 people as he returned again and again to his slogan, 'Mississippi matters.' Earlier that day he'd taken Harris to a clinic in Clarksdale he said is at risk of closing next year because of Medicaid cuts in Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill.' He also hit gas prices, tariffs and the Epstein files the administration still hasn't released.

From that gym floor, Colom challenged Trump to a debate, offering to do it when the president flew in days later to headline a rally for Hyde-Smith in Corinth. Colom spent that night outside the rally, shaking hands and taking selfies along the line. Hyde-Smith took the microphone for only a few seconds: 'Is this not the best president in our lifetime?' she said, then walked away. After his own rally, Colom told CNN he wasn't scared of a matchup — 'I ain't Joe Biden,' he said. 'I'm ready to go.'

The result would redraw a line Mississippi hasn't crossed in generations. Six years after the state stripped the Confederate stars and bars from its flag, Colom could become its first Black senator since Reconstruction and its first Democratic senator since 1982. The last Democrat to hold the seat, John Stennis, was an avowed segregationist.

Colom's path to this race runs through a blue slip. In 2022, Biden nominated him for a district court judgeship on Bennie Thompson's recommendation, and Sen. Roger Wicker was ready to back him — until Hyde-Smith refused to return her blue slip, the courtesy that lets a home-state senator stall a nominee. She bragged about it on election night, claiming victory early and telling supporters she blocked Colom from the bench and they blocked him from the Senate.

Raphael Warnock never stopped working the state, calling and texting Colom advice and raising $750,000, much of it early money for voter registration and mobilization, while pressing Chuck Schumer to do more, according to a person familiar with the conversations. Schumer stayed skeptical. Brandon Presley, the 2023 Democratic nominee for governor, said James Carville phoned him about running this time and he deferred to Colom; Presley lost his own race by 3 percentage points, just over 26,000 votes, after Mike Espy fell far short against Hyde-Smith in 2020. 'We felt like Noah: nobody wanted to listen,' Presley said. 'And then it started to rain.'