‘Pick another protein’: A cattle rancher senator’s answer on beef prices could give Democrats their first Mississippi Senate win since 1982

Three years ago, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith made sure Scott Colom would not become a federal judge. Now, he may take her Senate seat.

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.

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........

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