BLUE MISSISSIPPI - The Thursday AM Quickie 11/12/26
“Secretary of Defense” Peter Brian Hegseth visited The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier yesterday and behaved about as respectfully as you can imagine. Corey is back tomorrow. -Whitney
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ON THE SHOW TODAY
11/12: Emma is hosting solo today. Her guest is Donald Shaw, a journalist at Sludge, on to discuss his work covering the money behind Hakeem Jeffries and the former Chuck Schumer staffers who are now private equity lobbyists.
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Today you’ll read about Marco Rubio spending taxpayer money on personal trips; another Trump cabinet member relocating to a military base; and the growing number of DSA electeds.
THE BIG NEWS
BLUE MISSISSIPPI: Scott Colom Wins Historic Victory
Democrat Scott Colom toppled Confederate monument Cindy Hyde-Smith to become Mississippi’s next US senator, the first Black person elected to statewide office since Reconstruction, the Associated Press, Clarion Ledger and CNN reported. Colom took 49.2 percent of the vote to Hyde-Smith’s 48.7 percent. Celebrations sprang up across Mississippi and Democratic leaders nationwide sent their congratulations; in Jackson, one woman at Colom’s victory celebration, Vera Finley, said she was there “to celebrate being on the right side of history.” Per the AP:
“I am here to celebrate my parents and my grandparents. I am not one generation out of the cotton fields,” Finley continued. “Both of my parents picked cotton. And my great grandmother was sold here as a slave from Virginia to here. So I am so excited to be on this side of history.”
Finley said Colom’s backers “voted for change” and are “so excited about actually seeing that our votes matter.”
She said she hopes his election yields more unity.
“I hope that justice comes out of it,” she said. “I hope that love comes out of it.”
Colom’s historic win came after election officials spent the last week processing absentee and provisional ballots, which are called affidavit ballots in Mississippi. It also comes six years after the state retired its Confederate-themed state flag, and four years after Hyde-Smith spiked Colom’s nomination to become a US District Court judge in the Northern District of Mississippi.
Per the Mississippi Free Press:
Scott Colom has two Black predecessors in the Senate, both coming from the nation’s distant past. U.S. Sen. Hiram Revels, the first Black man to serve in either house of Congress, and Sen. Blanche K. Bruce, the last Black senator in the entire nation until the election of Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts in 1967.
Revels was born free, but Bruce was born into slavery. The Mississippi Legislature chose both to serve during Reconstruction. Scott Colom is the first Black senator from Mississippi to be elected by a vote of the people in history.
Congratulations to all in Mississippi. The state now has real representation, not some antiquated absentee bigot who couldn’t be bothered to campaign for her own seat. White people in the North love to write off Mississippi as a lost cause instead of seeing it as it is: a state full of righteous people who struggle against powerful, wealthy racists with virtually zero help from national Democratic organizations. Perhaps now Democratic leadership can see that they should commit sustained time, money, resources and effort to progressive leaders there. The South is winnable and as Colom said repeatedly during his campaign, “Mississippi matters.”