Early last Tuesday night, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s decisive reelection was one of the first results to be called. This barely elicited a peep from the couch in my home in Atlanta; it was not a surprise, and frankly, there were more interesting races to watch.

Turns out nothing was as interesting as what’s happening in Mississippi. We were all very familiar with the upset potential in Kansas and Texas — but none of the people in my living room had even heard of Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom before Tuesday night, much less expected him to come anywhere near winning. But by the time they tucked into dessert, the race was still in contention.

A Democrat with a shot in Mississippi! It demands a second Rice Krispie treat, and maybe a third.

The state hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1982. Most forecasters rated this year's race safely or likely Republican. But nearly a week after Election Day, Colom leads Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by about 2,500 votes, and the race still hasn't been called.

How did a deep-red state end up here? Last Friday, I asked two people who watched it happen: Emily Wagster Pettus, editor-in-chief of Mississippi Today, who has covered Mississippi politics since 1989, and Laura Santhanam, the newsroom's health editor.

Here's what they told me.

Santhanam said the groundwork for this race was laid long before the campaign, in what people pay for gas, groceries, and health care.

Health care has been an especially heavy weight. Mississippi is one of 10 states that never expanded Medicaid — my home state of Georgia is another — so many working adults buy insurance on the ACA marketplace. When enhanced federal subsidies for those plans expired last year, premiums for people renewing coverage more than doubled on average. The state's insurance commissioner says enrollment has since dropped by half. Benchmark premiums will rise another 23% in 2027.

That forces what Santhanam called "the cruel calculus" many Mississippians already make: whether to take their medication every day, or skip a day so they can afford food and gas.

Hospitals are under strain too, especially since Congress passed HR 1 last year. No single change did it, Santhanam said, but together, it all became too much for many voters. 

Colom started his campaign early. Pettus remembers talking with him on the street in downtown Jackson during the National Folk Festival last November, a full year before the election, as he pressed the flesh with festivalgoers.

He also went where the health care crisis was. This spring, Greenwood Leflore Hospital in the Mississippi Delta warned employees it might close. Colom went to Greenwood, talked with staff who'd worked there for decades, and gave a press conference in the parking lot across the street.

Hyde-Smith ran a complacent campaign. She never agreed to debate Colom. Her TV ads, Pettus said, were standard for Republicans this cycle, casting Colom as a radical liberal funded by George Soros.

The senator has taken some action to help rural hospitals hurt by cuts to the Medicaid funds that are often their lifeline: She has sponsored legislation to help struggling and closed rural hospitals qualify for a Medicare designation that pays them more, and in local interviews this fall she pointed to her work keeping a hospital in Franklin County open. But Santhanam said much of that work happened in the background, folded into larger bills, and came too late for at least one hospital. 

All in all, her actions weren’t enough to swing decisive voter support her way, Santhanam said.

The Delta, a largely Black, low-income region, went hard for Colom — not a big surprise to anyone who’s watched prior elections in the state. 

What stood out to Pettus was where else he did well. He flipped Madison County, north of Jackson, and DeSoto County, south of Memphis. Both are suburban, majority-white, and usually Republican. He also did well in the four northeastern counties where he's the district attorney. Democrats don't usually win there either.

Some of Colom’s appeal in these regions started before he even got into politics. His father ran for state treasurer as a Republican in 1987 but more recently has become an outspoken critic of the Trump administration. The well-regarded family has a history of public service, and in a small state of only about 3 million people, reputation spreads fast, said Pettus: “It’s not six degrees of separation, it’s two or three.” 

Hyde-Smith has beaten a strong Democrat twice before: Mike Espy, a former congressman and agriculture secretary, lost to her in 2018 and 2020. Espy did well but never got over the line, and Pettus said many people expected this race to go the same way.

The difference, she said, is that the national party invested in the contest. Some of the investment came late in the race, but it bought some really high-impact ads, said Pettus, including a sendup of the movie Sinners starring Colom and his actual twin brother. The money also bought a bigger social media presence and brought in surrogates like Bill Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg.

Mississippi counts mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive within five business days. But the bigger delay is related to affidavit ballots, which voters cast when there's a question about their registration or ID. 

There are far more affidavit ballots than usual in the state this year, largely because the secretary of state's office gave counties unverified data from the credit bureau Experian to clean their voter rolls. Inactivations more than doubled in some counties.

Pettus described one voter who moved from Jackson to suburban Madison about seven years ago and has been registered there ever since. Based on the Experian data, election officials mailed a postcard to her old Jackson address. She never got it, didn't respond, and was marked inactive. 

Her husband, who registered at the same time and lives in the same house, voted using a regular ballot. She had to vote by affidavit.

Secretary of State Michael Watson has said affidavit voting catches errors and that the extra step is worth it for cleaner rolls. Before the election, his office was too busy to explain why inactivations doubled after the primaries to the point that one in every nine Mississippi voters was inactivated by Election Day.

Maybe he and his staff will have a little more bandwidth to explain themselves to the public that pays their salaries in the coming weeks.

Regardless of the vote result, a U.S. Senator can only do so much to lower health care costs and improve health care access for the people of their home state. They can vote to allow federal money to keep rural hospitals open, and they can push back on tariffs and other policies hitting residents’ wallets — but they can’t expand Medicaid. That’s up to a state’s governor and legislature, and neither changed hands in Mississippi this month.

You can stay up-to-date on new developments at Mississippi Today.   

What surprised you most about last week’s election results? How much did health care play a role in your vote? Email me at [email protected], fill out this form, or find me on Signal at kerenlandman.07.

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