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The Mississippi Senate race is still uncalled on Monday, six days after Election Day.
A new county by county look at the preliminary results explains how Scott Colom built his lead.
At least 18 Mississippi counties flipped to Colom this year.
Most of those counties backed President Donald Trump in 2024.
This year they chose a Black Democrat for the United States Senate instead.
Major Takeaways
At least 18 counties flipped, swinging toward Colom by an average of 10.9 percentage points.
DeSoto County gave Colom about 52 percent after giving Kamala Harris about 37 percent in 2024.
Madison County, the strongest Republican stronghold in the state, narrowly backed Colom.
Forrest County, named for the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, backed Colom 54 percent to 44 percent.
The race remains uncalled, with certification set for November 13.
How the Mississippi Senate Race Map Moved
The flips were not scattered at random across the map.
Colom made his largest inroads in three regions of the state.
He gained in the northwest corner, in the west central counties, and in the east central counties around his native Lowndes County.
Seven of the flipped counties last elected a Democratic senator in the 1980s.
Some counties are still close enough to move again as the last ballots are counted.
In Montgomery County, Hyde Smith leads by only four votes.
The flipped counties swung toward Colom by an average of 10.9 percentage points.
That is not a drift. That is a map changing its mind in public.
DeSoto County Delivered the Loudest Flip
The largest change came in DeSoto County, the fast growing home of the Memphis suburbs in the northwest corner.
Colom earned about 52 percent of the vote there this year.
Kamala Harris brought in about 37 percent there just two years ago.
DeSoto last elected a Democratic senator in 1982, when John Stennis won his seventh term.
A county that suburban and that Republican does not flip on turnout alone.
It flips when voters who usually choose Republicans decide to cross over.
Madison County Was Never Supposed to Flip
The most striking flip may have come in Madison County, just north of Jackson.
Madison is probably the most populous Republican stronghold in Mississippi.
It grew as a white flight suburb and has long stood as the crown jewel of the state Republican Party.
Madison is mostly white, and fewer than 10 percent of its residents live below the poverty line.
Next door, Hinds County is largely Black, and nearly a quarter of its residents live below the poverty level.
Colom narrowly won the majority of Madison County anyway.
Madison voters comfortably reelected Republican Representative Michael Guest on the same ballot.
That split tells its own story. Madison was not rejecting a party. It was rendering a verdict on Hyde Smith herself.
Young Voters Flipped the University Counties
More young Mississippians voted this year, and they largely chose Colom.
That energy showed up clearest in the three big university counties.
Colom flipped Forrest County, home to the University of Southern Mississippi.
He flipped Lafayette County, home to the University of Mississippi.
He flipped Oktibbeha County, home to Mississippi State University.
Lafayette County is also where a separate campus investigation at Ole Miss is drawing national attention this week.
Students who organized, registered, and showed up helped move counties their parents never contested.
In Forrest County the Flip Carries History
Forrest County is named for Nathan Bedford Forrest.
He was a Confederate general, a slave trader, and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
With about 97 percent of the county vote counted, Colom led Hyde Smith there 54 percent to 44 percent.
Trump carried the same county 58 percent to 40 percent in 2024.
Outside the county courthouse in Hattiesburg stands a Confederate monument raised in 1910.
County residents narrowly voted in 2020 to keep that monument in place.
Across from it stands a memorial to Vernon Dahmer.
Dahmer was a civil rights activist murdered in 1966 after Klansmen firebombed his home.
He had spent his life fighting to register Black voters in Mississippi.
His memorial carries his words: “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.”
Hattiesburg was also a Freedom Summer town in 1964, where organizers opened freedom schools and challenged registration rules built to keep Black Mississippians from voting.
Sixty years after Dahmer was killed for that work, his county backed a Black Democrat for the Senate.
Colom Says the Message Did the Work
Colom says the flips came from a message built on the cost of daily life.
“I found a message that inspired those voters,” he said in a November 6 interview.
“You can’t feed your children with those lies, the lies they were running on me.”
He stayed out of culture war fights and talked about prices instead.
He promised to bring down gas prices by ending the war in Iran.
He backed raising the minimum wage and putting more investment into infrastructure.
He told wavering Republican voters he would get them what they were promised in 2024.
He also drew a plain contrast with the incumbent, calling her uninvolved and uninterested in the problems average Mississippians face.
“They wanted someone that would actually listen to them,” Colom said.
Hyde Smith’s campaign has said thousands of votes remain to be counted from dozens of Republican counties.
Her campaign says it is confident those votes will reinforce her path to victory.
What the Flips Mean for Black Mississippi
A Colom win would make him the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.
He would also become the first Democratic senator the state has sent to Washington in more than 40 years.
The map behind him matters as much as the margin.
Black voters in Jackson, the Delta, and the college towns supplied the foundation, as they have for generations.
What changed is that suburban and university county voters finally built on top of that foundation.
Next year brings statewide elections in Mississippi, with the governor’s race and every legislative seat on the ballot.
Colom has opened a door in Madison and DeSoto, where all but one legislator is a Republican.
He warns that walking through that door will still take work.
“I hope people do not think that what happened in this election was very easy,” he said. “It was very difficult.”
He credited months of hard work, hard fundraising, and a vision that unites people.
The Count Still Has to Finish
None of this is final until the count is final.
Vote tallies in circulation on Monday morning differed by a few hundred votes.
One statewide count put Colom ahead by 2,170 votes as of 9 a.m. on Monday.
The national count used in our earlier coverage put his lead at 2,574 votes.
Absentee and affidavit ballots are still being counted in counties across the state.
Our coverage of how affidavit ballots have been breaking for Colom shows why those last envelopes matter so much.
Voters have until Tuesday, November 10, to cure ballot issues, and counties must certify results by November 13.
Mississippi has no recount law, so any challenge after certification would have to go through a court.
Until a call comes, the flipped map is the story.
Eighteen counties that were supposed to be closed to a Democrat are now open.
Follow the finish of this race and all of our Mississippi coverage at Urban City Podcast.
