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IrelandMississippi's tight Senate vote reaches into Chicago's family histories
NBC Chicago visits Bronzeville residents whose connections to the unresolved election run through the Great Migration and generations of family memories.
NBC Chicago
Story of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 216,016 views a day, 77 times a normal first day on this channel (2,819).
Chicagoans with Mississippi roots react to Senate race
At Sip & Savor in Bronzeville, an unfinished Mississippi election brings the conversation back to parents and grandparents.
NBC Chicago's Marion Brooks reports on Chicagoans watching Democrat Scott Colom's Senate contest with Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith. The race remained too close to call in the station's Friday report. Brooks notes that a Colom victory would make him the first Black person elected statewide in Mississippi since Reconstruction.
For Joe Hall, a South Side resident originally from Starkville, the moment brings thoughts of his late mother. Another customer recalls her grandfather moving to Chicago and warning her father never to return to Mississippi. Their accounts connect the election to the Great Migration, when Black Americans left the South and built new lives in cities including Chicago.
Bronzeville resident Deanna Newsom describes how racism and oppression in Mississippi affected generations of her family. The possibility of change there, she explains, carries a personal weight that distance has not erased.
The short report drew an estimated 216,000 views in its first day, compared with roughly 2,800 for a usual NBC Chicago Short. In the comments, viewers also trace family connections between Mississippi and Chicago, recalling hometowns, summer visits and relatives who moved north.
The report closes without declaring a winner: Brooks says mail-in ballots have until Tuesday to arrive.
An American lawyer and Mississippi district attorney since 2016. He is the Democratic nominee for Mississippi’s U.S. Senate seat in the 2026 election.
More on Wikipedia ›A Republican who has represented Mississippi in the U.S. Senate since 2018. She previously served as the state’s agriculture and commerce commissioner.
More on Wikipedia ›Published on Trari
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- Channel
- NBC Chicago
- Subscribers
- 459,000 ▲ 1,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 3,547,835
- Channel views, pace per day
- 660,245 (on a normal day: 417,232)
- Video published
- November 7, 2026
- Video views so far
- 247,250 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 216,866
The numbers
The report reached far beyond NBC Chicago's usual first-day audience for Shorts, with a much busier comment section too.
💡 Test your knowledge
Reconstruction followed which American war?
Reconstruction was the period after the Civil War when the United States confronted rebuilding and the rights of formerly enslaved people.