There’s a blue wave, a blue tsunami, and now a mega-tsunami. Maybe that's what we should call this cycle for Democrats. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) has gone down in Mississippi — deep-red Mississippi was washed away in the blue wave as Democrat Scott Colom defeated the Mississippi Republican, becoming the state's first black senator since Reconstruction. The last black senator from Mississippi was Blanche K. Bruce, who left office in 1881. Regarding the spike in beef prices, Hyde-Smith’s ‘pick another protein’ remarks likely contributed to her defeat, along with a host of Republican voters staying home (via Politico):

Mississippi voted blue, in a shock win for Democrats.

Democrat Scott Colom ousted Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in a state that went for President Donald Trump by 23 points in 2024. He will be the first Black senator elected in Mississippi since the Reconstruction era — and the first Democrat from the state headed to the Senate in 44 years.

Colom, a Democratic district attorney, ran a scrappy campaign that saw some national money and resources in the final stretch of the race.

Hyde-Smith was appointed to the Senate in 2018 and had since won election to the seat twice, but she faced attacks from Colom that she was out of touch and indifferent to rising grocery and gas prices during Trump’s second term.

Hyde-Smith conceded last night:

Colom clinched a win by cobbling together a hodgepodge political coalition. The state has a large black population, which gives Democrats more than a good shot at winning statewide, but there needs to be either depressed white turnout or a significant chunk of that voter base defecting to the Democrats. That hadn’t happened until this year. But there were signs that Hyde-Smith was beatable (via NYT):

…hundreds of thousands of Black voters, white voters, enthusiastic college students, angry suburbanites and discontented small-town conservatives, an unparalleled coalition that has put Mississippi on the cusp of history.

[…]

The circumstances behind Mr. Colom’s electoral performance may be a combination of hard work and luck, a skilled candidate running a sharp campaign at just the right time. But history hangs heavy in Mississippi, and the significance is profound. The huge Black turnout this year was in part a reaction to efforts in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South to redraw district lines that would cut up majority-Black seats in Congress and in state legislatures.

[…]

Mississippi’s political math is not complicated. The state’s Black population, which overwhelmingly votes Democratic, is around 37 percent, the largest proportion of any state, so a Democratic candidate running statewide has a high floor. But with a white population that is overwhelmingly Republican, the ceiling for a Democrat is not far from that floor. In 2008, Barack Obama’s first campaign saw a record turnout of Black voters, and he drew 43 percent of the vote.

A successful Democratic candidacy in Mississippi thus needs to spur a high turnout among Black voters while winning roughly a quarter of the white vote. After 1982, when John Stennis became the last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in Mississippi, Democrats began to lose races up and down the ballot.

But after the Obama years, when statewide Democrats were all but wiped out, some candidates started sowing the seeds of a comeback: Mike Espy, a former Democratic House member and the first Black man to serve as agriculture secretary, came about seven points short of Ms. Hyde-Smith in a special election for the Senate seat in 2018.

Again, no time to pout. The GOP must hold the line, and also re-analyze what the hell happened here. That part could get messy.