Mississippi’s probable senator-elect should not have had to wage his fight alone.
Photo: Eric Shelton/AP Photo
The Associated Press and others have made it official: Democrat Scott Colom is going to become the next U.S. senator from Mississippi, and the first Black senator from the state since Reconstruction. The prediction markets had already been certain Colom won, but it took a week for his victory to be called while some absentee ballots and provisional votes were still outstanding. Now there should be hard questions about why national Democrats did not see this result coming and didn’t do more than the very little they did to help Colom upset the evidently weak Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith.
Yes, several leading Black politicians, plus Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, offered Colom some hands-on assistance, which drew some needed national attention. And, yes, during the final two weeks of the campaign, the national Senate Democratic PAC bought some ads and threw some money Colom’s way. But compared to what the party was committing to other Senate races, it was sofa-cushion money. Early on, Democrats targeted national spending on races their candidates eventually won easily, like Georgia and North Carolina, and later, they focused on late-breaking opportunities like Kansas and even South Carolina while spending to shore up Democratic-leaning races in Maine and Michigan. They spent heavily on Ohio and Texas nonstop. A little more in Mississippi might have eliminated any doubt about one of the most remarkable political upsets in living memory. And even a little more effort in Louisiana, where Jamie Davis came within 25,000 votes of upsetting Republican incumbent Julia Letlow, could have produced an equally shocking result. And Florida Democrats believe more national help could have lifted Senate candidate Angie Nixon and gubernatorial candidate David Jolly to victory in races that wound up being very close.
So what was the problem? Colom understandably doesn’t want to blame Chuck Schumer and his likely future colleagues in the Senate Democratic Conference. But he’s clearly annoyed with the Beltway conventional wisdom and the institutions that help define it:
In defense of the Cook analysts, they typically base their ratings on polls, electoral history, and interviews with candidates, party leaders, and journalists on the ground in the places where the races are underway. So there may be some shooting-the-messenger in Colom’s complaints about Cook, which did move his race from “Solid R” to “Likely R” (a category where upsets are considered possible). But he’s right that Cook and most of the other experts, along with the national Democratic Party, underestimated the strength of their southern wing.
Perhaps there was an unconscious racial element in this myopia, since Colom, Davis, and Nixon were all Black candidates in red states that have not elected Black statewide candidates in living memory. But it seems to be more of a regional issue. White southern Democrats like the gubernatorial candidates in Alabama (Doug Jones), Florida (Jolly), and Tennessee (Jerri Green) were also written off and came very close to huge upsets. Meanwhile, the Beltway Establishment did not underrate Georgia’s Black Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Keisha Lance Bottoms (whose race was rated a toss-up by Cook), despite her terrible fundraising disadvantage against billionaire Rick Jackson, for the simple reason that abundant polling showed her in a close race all along. So one very clear lesson of 2026 is that the national parties should do a lot more polling of states on the periphery of their vision, particularly in a “wave” election year. Even if the polling itself underestimated Democratic voting strength, as it did nationally by about 4 percent, it would have shown that a combination of strong Black turnout and swing-voter unhappiness with Donald Trump put much of the South within reach.
Perhaps the most difficult problem is that party strategists, like military strategists, have a strong tendency to fight the last war, basing their calculations on what happened in the last election. There is in fact no more reliable indicator of electoral outcomes in any given place than how that place has voted in the recent past. But there was abundant evidence throughout the 2026 cycle that the GOP’s 2024 coalition was falling apart. National Democrats (and the “prognosticators” they inform) should have been more open to the fresh opportunities Trump’s intense unpopularity presented for them. And strong “under-the-radar” candidates like Scott Colom should not have been forced to beg for attention and win an unequal fight on his own.
This post has been updated following Colom’s victory.
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