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Yup, we’re still covering last week’s Blue Tsunami Midterms on today’s BradCast , as the hits keep coming. [ Audio to full show follows this summary. ]

As we finished yesterday’s show, the media finally called the race in favor of Democratic District Attorney and U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom , in his historic victory over incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi . While we’ve been describing Colom for weeks as likely to become the first Black man set to serve as Senator from the state since 1875, the truth is even more shameful than that.

As I describe at the top of today’s show, the last Black U.S. Senator to represent the Magnolia State was a man named Blanche Bruce , born into slavery in Virginia, before escaping to freedom and settling in Mississippi. He was eventually chosen by the state Legislature as U.S. Senator in 1874 ( his term began in 1875 ). But once the White Supremacist Democrats at the time won back control of the post-Civil War state Legislature, they never appointed another Black man to the job before ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913 which replaced the state legislative appointment of Senators with director popular elections nationwide.

Even then, no Black person from Mississippi — the state with the highest African-American population in the country per capita — would be elected as Senator until this week, making Colom not only the first Black man to serve as the state’s Senator in 140 years, but also the first ever actually elected by the people of Mississippi!

The long tail of the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow Era — and the insidious and systemic ways it has been woven into the fiber of our laws and state Constitutions even today — echoed elsewhere in last week’s elections.

I’m joined today by Bolts Mag’s veteran reporter ALEX BURNESS. We spoke with him last month , a few weeks before the election, about the Constitutional Amendment voted on in Virginia last week that would, once and for all, rewrite the Commonwealth’s Constitution to remove permanent disenfranchisement for former felons. I’m happy to say the measure, Virginia’s Question 3, passed comfortably last week by some 15 points . Though even that means that there are still about a million and a half voters in Virginia who support the nearly 125-year old Jim Crow Era voting restriction purposely adopted in order to disproportionately disenfranchise Black people. Or, as Burness puts it, to “ intentionally limit Black political power.”

“That is not my reading of it,” he argues, “look at the framers of Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution, or Virginia’s 1902 Constitution. State officials at that time were very clear that they wanted to disproportionately police Black people and then tie convictions of Black people to voting rights.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about felon disenfranchisement in Mississippi, and the incredible barriers that Mississippi voters and the Colom campaign had to overcome to get to this point,” he tells me. “When it’s all over, he will have won by some number of single-digit-thousands of votes. Bear in mind, during this cycle and all others moving forward in that state, about 70,000 people there are disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. In that group is dramatic over-representation of Black people, which is the case for every state that disenfranchises people. Because Black folks in every state, data show, are disproportionately policed and incarcerated.”

It’s not only that, Burness charges. Mississippi has some of the toughest barriers to voting in the nation. No early voting or no-excuse vote-by-mail and no Election Day registration. “In Mississippi, I don’t think people should look at this [Colom] result and say, ‘Wow, he really squeaked it out’. He did. But the institutional, structural racism that is baked into Mississippi’s politics — the data tells me that 12 times the number of Scott Colom’s margin is currently disenfranchised, and that population leans way disproportionately Black. That’s a really important story that is not a footnote here, but in fact helps define that state’s politics in this cycle and others.”

Burness, with his colleagues at Bolts, keep their eyes not only on top of ticket federal and gubernatorial races, but a whole bunch of statewide offices, legislative races, and other contests that don’t enjoy nearly as much attention as they deserve. For example, before the election they published a “cheat sheet” of more than 670 contests up and down the ballot — including District Attorney, Sheriff, School Boards and much more — along with context on why they matter.

For his part, Burness has been watching elections for chief state election officials (usually Secretaries of State) closely this year — those who will oversee voting during the coming 2028 Presidential cycle. On that, there was a lot of good news for those who believe in voting rights..

Democrats flipped previously Republican-held Sec. of State seats from Georgia to Ohio to Indiana and, indirectly, even Texas , where the state’s Governor (in this case, newly-elected Democrat Gina Hinojosa ) chooses the their own SoS.

“Two-thirds of the country was voting directly or indirectly on who was going to control election administration in that state,” Burness observes. “These people really matter. It matters whether it is important to them that people be able to vote. Or whether it’s important to them to make it harder for people to vote.”

“Following all these flips — literally every state that could remotely be considered a swing-state — Republicans control election administration in only one of them,” he reports. “Republicans will not have control of election administration in 16 of those states.”

Burness has also been pouring over state Supreme Court contests held last week all over the country. The huge Blue Wave reached those races as well and, in a number of states, have set up court majorities to flip from “red” to “blue” as early as 2028.

And, one more before we say goodbye to Burness today, the race in Maryland that finally unseated a long-serving, notoriously anti-immigrant Sheriff . As he notes: “Sheriffs matter very, very much to the mass deportation project, and the extent to which they want to cooperate and collaborate with ICE makes a very big difference at the community level, and in terms of the Trump Administration’s overall ability to carry out this project.”

FINALLY TODAY… We’re joined by Desi Doyen for our latest Green News Report where, you’ll be happy to hear, voters also got a few things right on last week’s ballot regarding climate and environment! For the grimmer news on today’s GNR , I’ll let you tune in to find out…

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