Democrats Win Mississippi Senate Seat as Blue Wave Comes for Everyone

Democrats have done the unthinkable and flipped a Senate seat in Mississippi.

Democrat Scott Colom beat incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith with 49.19 percent of the vote, CNN projected on Wednesday, over one week after the election. Colom leads with more than 4,500 votes.

Colom will be the first Democratic senator in Mississippi in 37 years and the first Black senator in the state since Reconstruction.

In addition to her public backing of Donald Trump, Hyde-Smith really stepped in it when she encouraged people to “pick another protein” if beef was getting too expensive. The viral soundbite became the focus of one of Colom’s attack ads, where Mississippi residents said they’d rather “pick another senator.”

Colom’s victory is an astounding rebuke of the Republican Party in the Magnolia State. In 2024, incumbent Republican Senator Roger Wicker won with 62.81 percent of the vote.

Colom is a 43-year-old Black Democrat and the district attorney for the 16th judicial district in Mississippi. On the campaign trail, he argued that Trump’s tariffs and Iran war caused extreme harm to Mississippians. He also called to raise the minimum wage, expand Medicaid access, support farmers, and address the rural hospital crisis.

This is not just a big win for Democrats, who now have 56 seats in the Senate. It’s also a big win for Colom personally. Just three years ago, Hyde-Smith blocked him from becoming a federal judge.

In 2023, President Joe Biden nominated Colom to be a district attorney in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi. Hyde-Smith, however, blocked his nomination through the “blue slip” process, a tradition in which a senator can block a judicial nominee from their home state by refusing to return a blue-colored slip to the Judiciary Committee. Hyde-Smith refused to support Colom due to his support for trans rights and her (inaccurate) claim that Colom received funding from liberal philanthropist George Soros.

“I visited with the District Attorney recently, and I recognize that he is smart and well liked in his district,” Hyde-Smith said at the time, explaining her rejection. “However, there are a number of concerns I have regarding his record. As someone with a strong interest in protecting the rights of girls and women, I am concerned about Scott Colom’s opposition to legislation to protect female athletes.”

The Justice Department went after Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar’s former bodyguard in an effort to dig up dirt on one of President Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics.

Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Abdullahi Mohamed, who served briefly as Omar’s bodyguard, to try and further the federal investigation into the Somali-born lawmaker’s family history, The New York Times reported Wednesday. 

Earlier this year, prosecutors filed charges against Mohamed, alleging that he’d lied to a government official under oath. Mohamed’s lawyer, Bruce Rivers, said that prosecutors spent months attempting to turn his client into an informant to bolster their nascent case against Omar. Rivers said that prosecutors repeatedly told him and his client that the investigation into the Minnesota Democrat was “100 percent being run by 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my almost 28 years practicing law in federal court,” River told the Times. 

The Justice Department dropped the charges against Mohamed in September, shortly before Homeland Security agents raided Omar’s Washington, D.C., home as part of a racist campaign to get her denaturalized and deported. The probe centers on questions about Omar and her family’s citizenship status, including baseless allegations that Omar married her brother in order to secure his citizenship, and whether Omar’s father lied on her citizenship application. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested last month that the government was building a RICO case against Omar and her family.  Border czar Tom Homan even suggested the FBI was somehow involved. It’s still unclear what, if any, evidence DHS has found to support its case.

In a statement, the DOJ claimed that the charges against Mohamed were “completely unrelated to any current investigations.”

Many eligible voters were mistakenly kicked off of the rolls in Mississippi, preventing them from casting their votes normally and creating a backlog of affidavit ballots waiting to be verified and counted. That’s a large part of the reason that the U.S. is still waiting for the state’s election results in the razor-thin Senate race.

Mississippi Today reports that several civil rights groups contacted Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson days before last week’s midterms, warning him that hundreds of thousands of voters needed to have their registrations reinstated. The voters were kicked off Mississippi’s rolls because Watson’s office sent bad data to local officials based on unverified information from credit agency Experian.   

On Election Day, at least tens of thousands of voters showed up at the polls to find that they couldn’t vote, because Watson’s office ignored the warnings. More than 230,000 voter registrations in Mississippi were deemed inactive by Watson, and now local election officials have to count and verify thousands of affidavit ballots, setting up a legal fight.

In 2024, Watson signed a $50,000 contract with Experian to use the company’s unverified address data across the state—the first time that the state was using information outside of government data. But the data was error-ridden, and Mississippi Today discovered issues back in March, which went unaddressed.

As a last-ditch effort, a coalition of civil rights groups including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU of Mississippi, and the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote to Watson and Laura Henderson-Courtney, the senior attorney of the secretary of state’s elections division, four days before the midterms, asking Watson to reinstate anyone kicked off the state’s voter rolls because of Experian’s data. They also asked him to tell local election workers to make sure inactive voters got affidavit ballots. The letter was ignored.

“The ACLU, nor any other third party, have the authority to dictate applicable state and federal laws regarding elections in Mississippi,” Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jonson told Mississippi Today in an email acknowledging that the office got the letter. “Per state law, the Statewide Election Management System (SEMS) is currently in a blackout period thus no systemic voter roll maintenance is allowed.”

In a news conference on Tuesday, Scott Colom, the Democrat narrowly leading incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi’s Senate race, called out Watson for using the data and ignoring the warnings, including some from Experian itself. 

“Experian told [Watson] they were not reliable. And he did it anyway. So, I think that this chaos is a result of that decision. And it’s not me just saying it. The reporting about this has been great. Republicans and, you know, Republican counties, with election commissioners … are saying this was chaotic,” Colom said. “Our secretary of state, why did he use Experian when they told him it was unreliable?”

Even on Veterans Day, President Donald Trump couldn’t hide his total disrespect for U.S. military service members.

Speaking at a wreath-laying ceremony at the tomb of an unknown soldier at Arlington National Cemetery Wednesday, Trump said they’d gathered to honor those whose ranks have formed a “mighty wall of flesh and blood, bravery and devotion that has defended our freedom for 250 years.”

It’s not typically considered appropriate, empathetic, or even humane for anyone, let alone the commander in chief of the U.S. military, to refer to his soldiers as a “wall of flesh.” They also don’t typically use their honorary addresses to make pointed political overtures against individuals who might “hurt or damage our country with bad, foolish, horrible ideology.”

It’s no secret that Trump doesn’t respect the troops. He regularly downplays how many U.S. service members have lost their lives as a result of his eight-months-long “six week war” against Iran, even calling the conflict “small potatoes” compared to wars with many more casualties.

Trump is no friend to veterans, either. His administration has gutted thousands of employees from the Veterans Administration, leaving our nation’s veterans struggling to access essential care. And, of course, who can forget when he called dead soldiers “losers” and “suckers”?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials deliberately kept certain detainees out of a public database to make them harder to find.

The New York Times reports that tens of thousands of people with final deportation orders have been hidden from the database since September, confirming earlier media reports. This policy change has made it almost impossible for lawyers and family members to find their loved ones’ locations, and ICE’s contractors were given a script to use on callers informing them that the detainees’ locations were no longer available.

ICE’s detention system encompasses over 300 facilities and was already chaotic before the change. Detained immigrants are quickly sent from one facility to another, and if their lawyers don’t know where they are, legal help is severely hindered. It’s a boon to the Trump administration’s efforts to deport large numbers of immigrants quickly without the obstacles of habeas petitions and other forms of due process.

If lawyers know where their clients are being held, they can fight their deportation orders and try to secure their release. But those options are almost wiped out after a person is deported, and if they’re missing from ICE’s system, they are almost doomed. Detainees could also be prevented from making phone calls or buying essential personal items like toiletries because someone on the outside can’t deposit money into their commissary account without knowing which facility they’re in.

One immigrant that the Times highlights is University of San Francisco nurse and professor Ann Lawani, who was detained in her pajamas from her home in Lodi, California, on September 16. Even after calling her family from a holding facility that day, her attorney and siblings still couldn’t figure out where she was.

“It was the worst time of my life, knowing she had been siphoned into an abyss and there was nothing I could do about it,” her brother, U.S. citizen Sam Lawani, told the Times.

When her lawyer, Natalia Vieira Santanna, tried to file a habeas petition, she did so in California, Lawani’s last known location. But DHS tried to get her petition transferred to Louisiana, where they had moved her, which would have restarted Lawani’s case and required a new lawyer. Vieira opposed that effort, pointing out that Lawani’s location was kept secret, and the judge in the case agreed, finding that “no diligent attorney could have known” where Lawani was.

The judge also blocked the federal government from deporting Lawani while her habeas petition was in progress, and ordered officials to explain why she shouldn’t be released. While she is in the country right now, Lawani’s location still isn’t in the public database, and other detainees have not been fortunate enough to have her resources and support.