‘Pick Another Protein?!’ GOP Senator’s Beef Price Flap Gets Charbroiled by Dem Rival in Viral Ad

(Screengrab via X)

Mississippi’s Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom is carving up an old slice of incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s (R-MS) past advice to Americans struggling with beef prices, pulling it out of the freezer and tossing it straight back onto the midterm grill.

A new campaign ad from Colom launched Tuesday revives Hyde-Smith’s past suggestion that consumers squeezed by soaring grocery bills “have so many proteins to choose from” other than beef, before cutting to a succession of Mississippians who say they’d rather change their representative.

“Pick another protein? Sh*t, I’d rather pick another senator instead,” one man says while standing over a barbecue cooking burgers.

At a diner, an elderly woman is even less interested in the senator’s suggested menu adjustment: “Pick another protein? She done lost her damn mind! I’d rather pick another senator.”

Another elderly woman, this time standing in a grocery store, barely makes it through the setup before the cut.

“Pick another protein?” she begins. “What the f–”

The spot eventually transitions to Colom himself, seated at his dining table and laughing as he delivers the campaign’s preferred substitution: “Pick another senator instead.”

The clip of Hyde-Smith is pulled from a February interview with WLOX after host Hugh Keeton asked what Republicans were doing about the rising cost of food, specifically pointing to beef prices.

Hyde-Smith, a cattle rancher who sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee, argued that commodity prices move through “peaks and valleys” and pointed to Trump administration energy policies as a way of bringing transportation costs down before serving up the line that Colom’s campaign is now gleefully reheating.

“And you know, you have so many proteins to choose from,” Hyde-Smith said.

At the time, beef averaged $6.75 per pound nationally, up from $5.55 when Trump returned to office in January 2025, according to federal data cited by the Mississippi Free Press.

Colom has made affordability a central plank of his challenge to Hyde-Smith, repeatedly hitting the Republican over grocery, fuel and health care costs. The district attorney is attempting to become Mississippi’s first Democratic senator elected since 1982.

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