President Joe Biden nominated Colom, a district attorney in northeast Mississippi, to the federal bench in 2022, and Mississippi’s other Republican senator, Roger Wicker, supported him. Hyde-Smith blocked the nomination because of what she called his “opposition to legislation to protect female athletes” and because of past support from a PAC funded by George Soros. And so in 2025, Colom announced he would run against her.

It’s been four years since that fated blocked nomination, and on Tuesday night, Colom led her by 1,138 votes in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1982. While the race has yet to be called, it seems like the issue that got him in the lead was simply the price of beef.

“So many options”

In February, a TV reporter asked Hyde-Smith—herself a cattle rancher who was the former Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce and also married a fifth-generation cattle rancher—what Republicans were doing about rising beef prices. “You know, you have so many proteins to choose from,” she responded.

The question wasn’t without a good reason: beef has gotten more expensive. The average pound of ground beef cost $6.79 in September, up from $5.55 when Trump returned to office in January 2025.

And so in a widely-viewed political ad entitled “Pick another protein,” Colom’s campaign let her do the talking and used her February interview, juxtaposing that with people grilling and buying beef at the supermarket. “Pick another protein? She done lost her damn mind!” one woman says in a diner. A man grilling burgers says he’d “rather pick another senator instead.” The spot ends with Colom at his own kitchen table, laughing as he delivers the same line.

On Thursday morning, following newfound popularity into the ad following the election and as results showed him with a razor-thin margin, Colom wrote in a post on X that it was “important people know the back story of this ad.”

The Open Society’s Patrick Gaspard “gave me the idea to take her inexcusable gaffe and do something edgy with it that could get attention,” Colom wrote. Then, “my content creator Ryan Sayles “directed and edited it. He should be considered the breakout-star of this cycle. He’s going to be a giant in the media consultant game. He did GAME CHANGING work with SO little.”

As of Thursday evening, seven counties Hyde-Smith carried in 2020 now favor Colom, who out-raised Hyde-Smith $5 million to a little more than $3 million after making the cost of living crisis the center of his campaign.

No one talks about affordability

Why a relative no-name challenger was able to out-raise an incumbent likely has to do with how Colom focused on wages, costs, hospitals and jobs—and how inflation was eating away at people’s stagnant earnings.

There’s a name for this: affordability. It’s a word President Donald Trump has spent the past year telling Americans isn’t real. “The word ‘affordability’ is a con job by the Democrats,” he said at a Cabinet meeting last December. In June, at the G7 summit, he called it a “fake word made up by the Democrats,” as consumer prices rose at their fastest pace in three years. At a rally in July, he again repeated the mantra that it was something Democrats “made up.”

Some Republicans had warned about dismissing the “affordability” issue. Pollster Frank Luntz said in December that Trump risked appearing out of touch if he kept calling affordability a “hoax” when Americans felt they were paying more.

It’s not just Trump—it came up again just days before the midterms when a Texas Christian University student asked Vice President JD Vance at a town hall how young people could afford to start families when the average home costs more than $415,000. Instead of answering immediately, Vance joked that he was asked only one question about Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s backside, before conceding that Republicans hadn’t done enough on affordability for young people.

So come Tuesday, it was no shock that voters named the cost of living and government corruption as their top two issues in AP exit polls, after Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress.

A historic win

If Colom wins, he’d be the first Democrat Mississippi has sent to the Senate since John Stennis won his last term in 1982. Stennis, who served from 1947 to 1989, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That same summer, President Lyndon Johnson, also a Democrat, signed the law knowing it could cost his party the South. “Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime—and mine,” Johnson told his special assistant, Bill Moyers, that night, according to Moyers’s account to the Guardian. Moyers died in 2025.

Among the counties now favoring Colom is Forrest County, home to Hattiesburg and named for Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Ku Klux Klan’s first grand wizard. Colom would also be Mississippi’s first Black senator since Blanche K. Bruce, who was born into slavery in 1841 and served from 1875 to 1881.

Because Mississippi is the only state that doesn’t allow recounts to be triggered automatically or requested by a candidate (so any challenge would go to court), the Democratic party is sending reenforcement to help with the remaining count.