Mississippi Goddamn

We're still tabulating the final results of the 2026 midterm elections, but the biggest takeaway already seems quite clear – southern politics have been completely upended.

Georgia has led the way here, thanks in large part to the tireless work of Stacey Abrams and her associates. Both its senators were Democrats before this last race, but now the party has swept control of all the top statewide offices – governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general – and also flipped the state house of representatives while drawing the state senate nearly to a tie.

And Texas, of course, has been the source of national excitement, with Democrats taking their first U.S. Senate seat in decades and, as in Georgia, miraculously flipped their state house and virtually every statewide office as well – governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and railroad commissioner – plus massive wins in the courts.

North Carolina saw the same kind of sweeping changes, taking another Senate seat and (results are still coming in) approaching a total inversion of the state's House delegation from 10-4 Republican to 10-4 Democratic. They took the state house back there too, and made similar inroads with the courts.

The rest of the region didn't see such massive statewide sweeps, but there were signs of success everywhere. Democrats reclaimed a Senate seat in South Carolina that had been Republican since Strom Thurmond switched parties in 1964. They made strong runs at supposedly-safe seats in Florida and Louisiana, but fell short due to a lack of outside support.

All of this – and much more at the local level – will give political scientists and pundits a lot to wrestle with in the coming months and years, as they try to understand the seemingly seismic nature of this electoral earthquake.

But for me, with my head in a manuscript about the voting rights movement of the 1960s, the place that really stands out is Mississippi. They haven't officially called the race for Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom, but at this point it just seems a formality.

Colom's success in Mississippi – like Democrats' successes elsewhere in the South – is the direct result of the dedicated and determined activism of African Americans. While white voters were less than enthusiastic to vote for the withered husk of incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, black voters turned out in amazing numbers to turn the tide here.

As I've watched the election returns roll in, it's been disorienting to see the names of counties I've been writing about – counties that were some of the most notoriously racist in the nation, counties that were segregationist strongholds with deep-rooted defenses of white supremacy – racking up huge wins for an African American Senate candidate.

Consider Forrest County, which was named after the Confederate general who founded the Ku Klu Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

This was a county where the politics of white supremacy were protected by voting registrar Theron Lynd, who used the state's so-called "literacy test" to deny qualified black voters from registering, even as he let illiterate whites sign up with no problem. While his predecessor had registered a handful of black voters to show he wasn't completely biased, Lynd refused to register any for several years. The Civil Rights Division waged a long war against him, but it ultimately took the Voting Rights Act to break his power.

And now an African American running for Senate is winning Forrest County by a margin of 54%-44%.

The same pattern plays out across much of the state.

In Yazoo County, where the racist registrar shot a pistol at the feet of a Civil Rights Division lawyer who had come to inspect his records, Colom is winning 59%-40%.

In Adams County, where the sheriff was a known member of the Ku Klux Klan, Colom is winning 63%-35%.

In Jefferson Davis County, a segregationist stronghold named after the president of the Confederacy, Colom is winning 65%-34%.

In Sunflower County, long the base for segregationist Senator Jim Eastland – chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who used his power in Congress to keep the Department of Justice completely out of the county well into the 1960s – Colom is winning 75%-24%.

In Leflore County, where the white assassin Byron de la Beckwith was given a hero's welcome after being acquitted for the murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Colom is winning 75%-24%.

In Hinds County, home to the state capital of Jackson and the scene of countless performances by segregationist governors and other assorted white supremacists in the statehouse, Colom is winning by a staggering 80%-19%.

There are so many counties where the voting rights struggle of the 1960s seemed impossible, where the tools of white supremacy were used to disfranchise and deny African Americans their most basic rights as citizens, where – even after the revolution of the Voting Rights Act – a result like this long seemed impossible.

Right up until it wasn't.

Mississippi.

Goddamn.