Mississippi electing Scott Colom as senator may be one of the biggest shocks of 2026

First Person - There have been many shocks in American politics the past few weeks, but there's nothing that quite compares to the election of Senator Scott Colom in Mississippi.

Colom, a Democrat and Black district attorney, stunned poll watchers by narrowly defeating the white Republican sitting US Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith.

The final vote, which took more than a week to confirm, shows Colom winning by a narrow 4000 or so votes - a result pretty much nobody outside of Mississippi saw coming even in the face of a mighty "blue wave" for Democrats nationwide.

The Associated Press and CNN projected Colom as the winner on Thursday (NZ time).

It is impossible to fully describe the magnitude of a Black Democrat winning a Senate seat in Mississippi, a state that's been deeply Republican for decades and has a long, sordid history of oppression of Black voters.

Colom will be the first Black senator in Mississippi since 1881 - and that man was born a slave.

He's also the first Democrat elected there since 1982. The campaign of Colom, 43, seemed filled with energy, compared to the lethargic efforts by Hyde-Smith, 67.

Sixty, seventy years ago, he could have been killed for even trying to vote in Mississippi, where the Ku Klux Klan and others fought any attempt by Blacks to vote well in the 1960s.

Mississippi is a word which feels haunted, slippery with meaning. There's no more evocative American state name, with all that entails.

The roots of my family run deep there. My mother was raised there, my grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there, in a quiet cemetery beneath the trees, tucked away down shadowy side roads.

I lived there myself from the ages of 18 to 25, from a freshman at the University of Mississippi to a fumbling young working journalist.

In August, I visited friends and family in Mississippi for the first time in years. The political campaign signs were only starting to come out, but nobody was talking about Scott Colom winning the Senate race. It didn't seem possible.

Every place on Earth has a tragic past if you dig far enough, but Mississippi is unique in its stains and glories. I can think of nowhere else I've lived where the absolute worst and the shining best of a place are so deeply intertwined, where one seemingly cannot exist without the other.

The horrors that were visited on the Black population there in the 20th century still turn my stomach, the suppression, cruelty and casual dehumanisation. The story of Emmett Till - a 14-year-old boy tortured and murdered by white racists in 1955 for allegedly daring to whistle at a white woman - is as good as any to illustrate how horrible things could get.

My mother was just about the same age as Till and grew up an hour or two away from where his blood was spilled. But she knew nothing about it at the time, until many years later when the story began to seep out into the wider culture. The South endlessly romanticises itself, which can create both great stories and cover up hard truths.

A place can have a terrible past and yet still have things to admire and love; in our everything-is-good-or-evil digital world, it can be hard to explain a place that is full of troubles and still working hard to be better, and yet can be full of kindness and talent. Mississippi is complicated.

The Mississippi I visited in August felt like it was inching forward still with reconciling that past - the university campus of what's known as 'Ole Miss' was now dotted with prominent signs about the historic racial outrages and terror, and the looming county courthouse, as Southern as it gets, now also features a large memorial about lynchings held there.

A monument to James Meredith, who became the first Black student at Ole Miss despite bloody, fatal protests in 1962, now stands proudly beside the campus library. Courage, a sign proclaims.

Bad things still happen in Mississippi all the time, like just this past week when two white female university students made global news for racist gestures toward Black students. Yet one hopes those foolish students are the exception of their generation - youth aged 18 to 29 overwhelmingly voted for Colom in Mississippi, by a 30-point margin.

Colom marked his campaign with viral and witty ads (if you haven't heard about "pick another protein", look it up), but he chose to end his run with a deeply serious ad filmed at the home of Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist shot dead in his driveway in 1963 while his wife and children waited inside.

"It's a powerful reminder of the sacrifice to gain the ballot, and nobody sacrificed more than Medgar Evers and his family," Colom told the media Friday.

"What was important to me about that ad is we didn't ask people to vote for me. We just talked about the sacrifice, talked about the story. We just wanted that to be the closing ad because I wanted that to be the last message that the people of Mississippi heard."

Colom's victory is not a rejection of the past. It's steeped in the past, and hopes for a future that eases Mississippi's massive inequalities.

Mississippi's William Faulkner famously said "The past is never dead. It's not even past," and that's still as Mississippi a thought as you can get.

I lived in Mississippi, loved a lot about it, grimaced at some things, and learned so very much about stories, writing and myself in my time there.

One election win doesn't fix America, of course, and Scott Colom may turn out to be just another politician. But even he can't stop what he symbolises today, in the often troubled country I came from that can still sometimes manage to surprise me.