Mississippi Election Produces Unapproved Democratic Winner
Mississippi suffered an outbreak of representative democracy Wednesday when Democrat Scott Colom was declared the winner of the state’s U.S. Senate race, interrupting its longstanding practice of awarding statewide office to Republicans before examining how many voters preferred someone else. Colom narrowly defeated Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith after election officials spent eight irresponsible days counting ballots, including ballots from heavily Democratic counties that had failed to understand their traditional decorative role.
Colom will become Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction and give Democrats a 55-seat Senate majority, two developments election experts said could encourage the public to associate voting with consequences. Republican officials objected that the count included registered voters, legally submitted ballots and other technicalities that distracted from the state’s clearly established color on cable-news maps. President Donald Trump, who endorsed Hyde-Smith and campaigned for her, offered a characteristically measured defense of national unity. “This was a perfect Republican victory before they added all the Democratic votes, which should never be allowed because Democratic votes are, by definition, votes for Democrats,” Trump said. “Everybody knows Mississippi belongs to us. It’s right there on the maps in very strong red.”
The defeat carried an additional indignity for Hyde-Smith, who previously helped block Colom’s nomination to the federal bench. The senator had reasonably assumed that preventing a qualified prosecutor from becoming a judge would cause him to leave public life, apologize for seeking advancement and perhaps take up a quiet hobby. Instead, voters handed Colom Hyde-Smith’s own job, establishing the destabilizing precedent that political retaliation can occasionally produce retaliation from politics.
Republican leaders immediately announced a comprehensive review of the loss, beginning with Black turnout, competitive candidates, ballot access and the continuing legal requirement that totals include votes for both parties. Officials also pledged to restore confidence in elections by ensuring future counts produce the confidence-restoring result selected before Election Day. Mississippi’s experiment with representative government has therefore been documented, contained and officially classified as voter error.
* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.