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By Sam Stevenson
Associate News Editor
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Scott Colom, Mississippi’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, has flipped Forrest County, a once reliably Republican county named for the Ku Klux Klan's first Grand Wizard, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
With 97 percent of ballots counted, Colom led Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith 54 percent to 44 percent, reversing the 18-point advantage President Donald Trump secured in 2024 in Forrest County, which contains majority-Black Hattiesburg, home to the University of Southern Mississippi.
Forrest County’s 29-point movement toward Democrats is an important local boost for Colom, although the statewide Senate race remained too close to call on Friday morning as officials processed outstanding ballots.
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At the time of writing, The Associated Press estimated that 96 percent of votes had been counted, with Colom leading Hyde-Smith by 1,813 votes, 466,775 to 464,962, or 49 percent to 48.9 percent.
Independent candidate Ty Pinkins was taking about 2 percent statewide, a potentially consequential share in such a narrow contest.
Speaking during a November 4 news conference in Jackson, Colom predicted that the outstanding ballots would ultimately deliver him the seat. "I am very happy with where we stand," he told reporters. "I’m confident once the process lays out, where we are, where the ballots are, we’re gonna win." He also pledged to "protect the process" and ensure election law was followed.
Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager Jake Monssen said in a public statement: "We remain confident that when every legally cast vote is fully and accurately counted, Mississippians will have reelected Cindy Hyde-Smith." The campaign thanked election workers and said it was closely monitoring the remaining count.
The Forrest County result carries further historical weight as Colom seeks to become Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since Blanche K. Bruce left office in 1881.
It comes a year after Black Democrat Johnny DuPree flipped a Republican-held state Senate seat covering parts of Forrest and Lamar counties, defeating Anna Rush by 69.2 percent to 30.8 percent.
Newsweek emailed the Colom and Hyde-Smith campaigns for comment on Friday morning.
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Why It Matters
Midterm elections frequently punish the party occupying the White House.
Yet Mississippi was not expected to provide one of 2026’s closest contests.
Trump won the entire state by nearly 23 points in 2024, making Colom’s competitiveness a particularly striking expression of the national pressure on Republicans.
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Forrest County’s Competing Legacies
Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Tennessee slave trader who became a Confederate general, later served as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.
Forrest County’s courthouse grounds encapsulate its unresolved history.
A Confederate monument erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910 stands opposite a bronze likeness of voting-rights activist Vernon Dahmer.
Dahmer, who led the local NAACP, helped Black residents register to vote despite a system built to exclude them.
Klansmen attacked his home with gunfire and firebombs in January 1966; he returned fire while his wife and children escaped, then died from his injuries.
His monument bears the words: "If you don’t vote, you don’t count."
Ellie Dahmer, his widow, later turned that principle into public service by winning election to the Forrest County Election Commission in 1992.
The two monuments have remained at the center of a wider debate over how Forrest County presents its past.
In a 2020 countywide referendum, voters rejected moving the Confederate monument to another location by 15,706 votes to 14,908.
Support varied sharply across the county, however: as many as 85 percent of voters in Hattiesburg supported relocation, while almost 80 percent in Dixie, a majority-white community about 10 miles south of the city but still within Forrest County, opposed it.
Deborah Delgado, a Black member of the Hattiesburg City Council, described the contrast between the monuments as difficult to reconcile.
"That just cause resulted in the murder of this man who was pursuing civil rights," she told the Mississippi Free Press. "And then we let this thing that caused his murder continue to stand."
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A County Shaped By Voting-Rights Battles
The 2026 result also carries weight because Hattiesburg was a center of Mississippi’s civil rights movement.
In January 1964, Black residents stood in the rain outside the courthouse as they tried to register, confronting a local system that processed only a handful of applicants at a time.
Later that year, seven Freedom Schools taught thousands of Black students subjects excluded from segregated public education, including Black history, foreign languages and how to petition the government.
Residents have since proposed renaming the county by removing one "r," transforming Forrest County into "Forest County" without requiring a dramatic change in pronunciation.
What Happens Next
Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race has not been called, and the figures remain unofficial as counties continue processing outstanding ballots for the second full day ahead of the November 13 certification deadline.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.
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Contact Newsweek editors on this story: John Fitzpatrick and Trevor Davies
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