It now seems pretty clear that Scott Colom (pronounced c’l-O-m or like ‘cologne’ but with a final m instead of an n) is going to be the next senator from the state of Mississippi – not called yet but getting close. He would be the first Democrat elected from Mississippi since 1982 and the first Black senator since Blanche K. Bruce who served from 1875 to 1881. But one striking thing about the claims of victory from Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, which manage to be both aggressive and half-hearted, is that as far as I can tell she has yet to appear in public since election day. I’m not even sure she’s done any media call-ins. Her first Twitter comment was written in the third person, as though the staffer who wrote it couldn’t even bother to pretend it was Hyde-Smith writing it. This turns out to be a through-line continuing from the campaign itself.
We’re already wise to the way the building Blue Wave in 2026 exposed a number of Republican incumbents who simply weren’t ready for prime time as candidates but had gotten by pretty much unchallenged on Republican dominance of their states. Out-going Senator Roger Marshall is the poster-boy for this dynamic. But Marshall at least mobilized late and mounted a campaign – a really comically bad campaign but still a campaign. Reviewing the wreckage of Hyde-Smith’s apparent defeat it really seems like she was at best a part-time candidate and that really over-states her involvement in the election.
President Trump’s decision to replace Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (a rare beacon of competence if not good values) with Stephen Miller confirms the predictable Trump storyline. Always double down. For maybe 48 hours Trump seemed stunned and drifting. Now he’s coming to from the smelling salts of ambient chatter about his political legacy concluding in disgrace and failure. We can’t know the future. But this is why Democrats can have realistic hopes of a second strong election in a row in 2028. Trump is making the characteristic decision of force feeding the country what it just spit up. We know this about Trump: he reacts to being dominated, owned and mocked by casting around for ways to assert power and dominance. It’s as predictable with him as night follows day.
It now seems pretty clear that Scott Colom (pronounced c’l-O-m or like ‘cologne’ but with a final m instead of an n) is going to be the next senator from the state of Mississippi – not called yet but getting close. He would be the first Democrat elected from Mississippi since 1982 and the first Black senator since Blanche K. Bruce who served from 1875 to 1881. But one striking thing about the claims of victory from Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, which manage to be both aggressive and half-hearted, is that as far as I can tell she has yet to appear in public since election day. I’m not even sure she’s done any media call-ins. Her first Twitter comment was written in the third person, as though the staffer who wrote it couldn’t even bother to pretend it was Hyde-Smith writing it. This turns out to be a through-line continuing from the campaign itself.
We’re already wise to the way the building Blue Wave in 2026 exposed a number of Republican incumbents who simply weren’t ready for prime time as candidates but had gotten by pretty much unchallenged on Republican dominance of their states. Out-going Senator Roger Marshall is the poster-boy for this dynamic. But Marshall at least mobilized late and mounted a campaign – a really comically bad campaign but still a campaign. Reviewing the wreckage of Hyde-Smith’s apparent defeat it really seems like she was at best a part-time candidate and that really over-states her involvement in the election.
President Trump’s decision to replace Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (a rare beacon of competence if not good values) with Stephen Miller confirms the predictable Trump storyline. Always double down. For maybe 48 hours Trump seemed stunned and drifting. Now he’s coming to from the smelling salts of ambient chatter about his political legacy concluding in disgrace and failure. We can’t know the future. But this is why Democrats can have realistic hopes of a second strong election in a row in 2028. Trump is making the characteristic decision of force feeding the country what it just spit up. We know this about Trump: he reacts to being dominated, owned and mocked by casting around for ways to assert power and dominance. It’s as predictable with him as night follows day.
Yesterday, I wrote about JD Vance’s push to make the 2026 midterm a referendum solely about the Iran War. Things were going great, he claims, substantively and politically, until the Iran War brought everything crashing down. We’re seeing that a number of Democrats, albeit for different reasons, want to push this line too. Yesterday Eric Levitz at Vox interviewed data guy David Shor who said something similar. If you’re not familiar with him, Shor’s in the group who argue that Democrats need to jettison hot-button social and cultural issues that make them unviable with big parts of the electorate — immigration, gender and sexuality, guns, policing, etc. This is one of these claims that is demonstrably accurate to a significant degree in electoral terms, but more complicated when it comes down to applying it to the practicalities, commitments and mutabilities of the actual world. In this case it leaves him wanting to place overwhelming emphasis on the Iran War since Democrats put up the biggest midterm landslide in half a century and mostly didn’t avoid hot-button issues, or at least not as much as people with this viewpoint said was required, for most of the 2026 campaign.
Here’s the discussion of this issue …
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TPM’s Untitled Live Show (Name TBD) returns today at 2 p.m. Eastern. If you think everything to be said about the midterms has already been said, you might be right, but we’ve got thoughts and analysis nevertheless. We’re going to pay special attention to the non-politician winners and losers from Tuesday night. I hope you’ll join Nicole, Hunter, Derick, and myself this afternoon on YouTube.
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