Mississippi senator to face a prosecutor she blocked from the federal bench, CNN projects
By Arit John, CNN
(CNN) — Mississippi’s Senate primaries set up a general election showdown between an incumbent and a challenger she blocked from federal judgeship.
CNN projected Tuesday that Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democrat Scott Colom, a district attorney, will win their parties’ primaries and face off in November.
The matchup comes three years after Hyde-Smith opposed former President Joe Biden’s nomination of Colom to serve as a US district court judge, a lifetime appointment. Under Senate tradition, judicial nominees typically only move forward if their home-state senators return “blue slips” approving the pick.
The state’s senior senator, Roger Wicker, approved of Colom’s nomination, as did two of the state’s past Republican governors, Haley Barbour and Phil Bryant.
Hyde-Smith said at the time she was against Colom’s nomination because of past support he received from liberal donor George Soros, who donated to a political action committee that backed his first district attorney race. She also cited his support for transgender rights – he was one of several prosecutors who signed onto a 2021 letter to “condemn the ongoing efforts to criminalize transgender people and gender-affirming healthcare across the country.”
Hyde-Smith will be heavily favored in the general election. Mississippi has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1982, when voters reelected segregationist John Stennis. President Donald Trump won the state in 2024 by 23 points, but Hyde-Smith’s races have been closer. In 2020, she beat former US Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy by 10 points, even as Trump carried the state by 17.
Democrats have been buoyed by signs they are making modest gains in the state, which has the highest percentage of Black residents in the country. The Democratic candidate lost the 2023 gubernatorial race by three points, and last year, the party picked up a handful of seats in the state legislature under new, court-ordered maps.
If elected, Colom would be the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction.
Colom, a seventh-generation Mississippi native, defeated an incumbent who’d been in office nearly 30 years in his 2015 district attorney race. He has pitched himself as a tough-on-crime Democrat and emphasized his record as a prosecutor.
Colom defeated Democrats Albert Littell and Priscilla W. Till, a distant relative of lynching victim Emmett Till, in Tuesday’s primary. Hyde-Smith fended off a primary challenge from physician Sarah Adlakha.
The-CNN-Wire
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