Raphael Warnock

(CNN) — Raphael Warnock wasn’t trying to make the crowd laugh.

“There’s one race I think we’re sleeping on, and that’s Mississippi,” the Georgia senator said as he talked up Democrats’ big plans for the year at a Washington, DC, fundraiser in April.

Warnock had been beating the drum for the Senate race in the deep-red state going back to last November, eagerly pointing out to anyone who’d listen that the percentage of Black voters in Mississippi was higher than in Georgia, which itself had defied history to elect him twice.

But the attendees did laugh, according to a recording obtained by CNN, and quite hard, until Warnock cut them off. “Mississippi — yes,” he said, before launching into a little of Scott Colom’s biography: a seventh-generation Mississippian who beat a long-time incumbent district attorney in Trump territory.

Six months later, Colom was standing on the floor of his old high school gym in Columbus, challenging Donald Trump to a debate. The president was coming to the state a few days later in an 11th-hour attempt to save GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, and Colom said he’d do it then or any other time.

“Other people are scared — no, I want him to answer why he didn’t release the Epstein files, why he betrayed the farmers,” the Democrat told CNN after the rally. “Listen, the reality is, I’m not scared, I ain’t Joe Biden. I’m ready to go. Let’s go. He ain’t gonna do it. He’s scared, too.”

Running for Senate at all, let alone like this, seemed like a crazy long-shot that afternoon in November 2024 when Chuck Schumer agreed to have Colom and his father over for lunch. Those were the days when Colom had already set his mind to run but was struggling to get national buy-in.

Now, he’d just had former Vice President Kamala Harris stump for him to 1,000 cheering people filling the seats and the stands, hearing their applause as he kept coming back to his slogan “Mississippi matters” in his unmistakably homegrown accent. On a break from working the crowd, he did a local TV interview with a former classmate turned reporter, talking about how it felt for this all to be happening on the same basketball court where he’d played as a teenager.

“It’s a real special moment for me. It was one that I’ll treasure for the rest of my life,” Colom told him.

But the 43-year-old quickly shifted back into campaign mode, pointing to the hundreds of thousands of Mississippians without health insurance and all the rural hospitals, like the clinic three hours away in Clarksdale he’d brought Harris to earlier that afternoon, at risk of closing next year because of the Medicaid cuts from Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” scheduled to kick in over the weeks ahead. The gas prices. The tariffs. Many of the Epstein files still not released by the administration.

“And our junior senator, the person that’s supposed to represent Mississippi, she caused all that to happen,” Colom said, never referring to his opponent by her name.

Now, just six years after Mississippi removed the Confederate stars and bars from its state flag, CNN’s Decision Desk projects that Colom will be the first Black senator from the state since Reconstruction and the first Democrat to win the seat since 1982.

The last Democratic senator in the state, John Stennis, was an avowed segregationist himself. Mississippi’s last Black senator, Blanche Bruce, was born into slavery.

Speaking at the historically Black Tougaloo College on Wednesday night, Colom opened his victory speech by honoring Mississippi’s Black roots, naming Hiram Revels, the country’s first Black US senator, and civil rights icons Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers.

“For me, this journey started with a prayer, y’all,” Colom said. “In Mississippi, our prayers have often changed the course of history.”

The celebration was rich with iconography, featuring performances of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn known as the Black national anthem, and “A Change is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke’s protest song from the civil rights era.

Hyde-Smith’s narrow defeat comes after a noticeably quiet eight years in the Senate, capped off by a campaign in which she was rarely seen — including when she took the microphone for just a few seconds at the rally Trump flew in to headline for her in the final week, just long enough to say, “Is this not the best president in our lifetime?” and then walk away.

Colom was at that rally in Corinth too, outside, shaking hands and taking selfies along the line.

“It’s local people that had faith that Mississippi could make progress, and its local people, like the people out here, who had faith that we can win this election,” he said Wednesday. “But as my mom would always tell me, faith without works is dead, and we worked this election, y’all. We worked. God didn’t want us to get it the easy way. He wanted us to get it the Mississippi way.”

Hyde-Smith has said little since election night, making rare remarks to reporters in the hallways of the Capitol on Tuesday where she projected confidence.

But on Wednesday evening, Hyde-Smith congratulated Colom in a video posted to social media.

“While this is not the outcome we worked for or hoped for, I respect the decision of Mississippi voters,” she said in a video shared to X. “I congratulate Scott Colom and wish him well as he takes on the tremendous responsibility of representing our great state.”

Colom has been around Mississippi politics for decades. As he proudly pointed out in his launch video, his father, Wilbur, worked for Ronald Reagan and was the Republican nominee for state treasurer all the way back in 1987 (written up by newspapers at the time as “A Different Sort of Agitator in Mississippi” and “A New Kind of Black Leader from Mississippi”). His mother, Dorothy, was an elected judge on a local chancery court. Colom himself was a municipal court judge and local prosecutor before being elected in 2015 as the district attorney for four counties in the state.

Early on, he caught the eye of the state’s lone Democratic congressman, Bennie Thompson, who included him in a leadership training program he helped create called the Mississippi Black Leadership Institute.

“We were trying to create a farm team for people who might pursue public service,” Thompson told CNN in October.

In 2022, Colom got his campaign origin story when President Joe Biden nominated him to be a district court judge on Thompson’s recommendation. Sen. Roger Wicker, the state’s senior senator, was ready to support the nomination, but Hyde-Smith refused to give back her “blue slip,” the Senate traditional courtesy enabling senators to singlehandedly delay or derail judicial nominees from their home states.

Prematurely claiming victory on election night, Hyde-Smith hearkened back to that.

“I blocked Scott Colom from being a federal judge, and you blocked him from being a US senator,” she boasted.

Brandon Presley, the 2023 Democratic nominee for governor in Mississippi and a longtime Democratic leader, said Colom has been talking about running for years. He recalled sitting with Colom, going over the numbers that showed Barack Obama winning more raw votes in Mississippi in his 2012 reelection than Republican Phil Bryant had gotten in 2011, when Bryant won the governor’s race.

“There were just a few of us who were idealistic enough to think that the chance was here, and if you did it in the right way you could win — and if you did it at the right time,” Presley told CNN.

That was a hard argument to sell at the time, Presley noted.

“We felt like Noah: nobody wanted to listen,” he said. “And then it started to rain.”

For this year’s Senate race, Presley said he fielded a call from famed Democratic consultant James Carville telling him he had to run. Presley said he was deferring to Colom. He joked to CNN that it took a few tries to get Carville to pronounce Colom’s name correctly (kuh-LOAM).

Colom’s pollsters saw a formula: high turnout among the state’s Black population, coupled with at least a quarter of the White vote wo