Mississippi Senate race remains uncalled as Democrat Colom's lead over Hyde-Smith keeps growing

Five days after Mississippi voters went to the polls, the state's U.S. Senate race remained too close to call as of Friday evening, with Democrat Scott Colom holding a lead of roughly 2,500 votes over Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith as county officials worked through thousands of affidavit and mail-in ballots.

The contest, in a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1982, has turned into one of the tightest and most closely watched in the country. A win for Colom, a district attorney making his first bid for statewide office, would make him Mississippi's first Black senator since the Reconstruction era, according to the U.S. Senate's own historical roster, which lists only two Black Mississippians — Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce — ever having held the seat, both more than 140 years ago.

As of Friday evening, Colom had 467,930 votes to Hyde-Smith's 465,356, a lead of 2,574 votes out of more than 950,000 cast statewide, according to Associated Press figures reported by the Mississippi Free Press's running results blog and independently by CNBC. Neither outlet nor the Associated Press had called the race as of Friday evening, leaving Mississippi among a small number of states nationally where no winner had been declared nearly a week after Election Day.

A lead that has grown, not shrunk

Colom's margin has moved in one direction since polls closed Tuesday. On election night, fewer than 50 votes separated the candidates with about 96 percent of ballots counted. By Thursday morning his lead had grown past 1,000 votes, and by Thursday evening it stood at 1,813. Friday's count pushed it to 2,574 — still a fraction of a percentage point, but a trend that has held through several days of additional tabulation rather than reversing, as late-counted ballots in several north Mississippi counties have broken heavily for Colom.

Election officials say what remains is dominated by affidavit ballots — provisional ballots cast when a voter's registration could not immediately be confirmed at the polls — along with mail-in absentee ballots. Mississippi's Republican Party chairman, Mike Hurst, estimated Wednesday that roughly 17,000 affidavit ballots and more than 3,000 mail ballots were still outstanding statewide. The state Secretary of State's office, which publishes county-by-county unofficial returns as they are certified, had not posted a final statewide tally as of Friday.

A rematch rooted in a blocked judgeship

The two candidates have a history that predates this campaign. In 2023, President Joe Biden nominated Colom, then the district attorney for Mississippi's 16th Circuit Court District, to a federal judgeship on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi. Hyde-Smith declined to submit the "blue slip" that Senate custom requires from a nominee's home-state senators before the Judiciary Committee will act, effectively killing the nomination. She said at the time she could not support Colom "for a lifetime" appointment to the federal bench, citing his record on transgender athletes in girls' school sports, a dispute reported by Axios in its profile of his Senate bid. Colom went on to challenge her for the Senate seat instead.

Hyde-Smith, first appointed to the Senate in 2018 and elected to a full term that year and again in 2020, has cast the race as a referendum on experience and conservative representation for the state. In a Facebook statement Friday afternoon, as her lead evaporated, she struck a defiant tone:

"We are not backing down. We will see this through to the very end."

Colom, who has said he is "confident" in the outcome, has framed his candidacy as proof that a Deep South state once considered unwinnable for Democrats is shifting. Exit polling cited by multiple outlets found Black voters, who made up roughly three in 10 of the state's electorate, backing him by overwhelming margins.

A fight over which ballots get counted

The narrowing margin has set off a parallel fight over process. On Wednesday, the Mississippi Republican Party and the National Republican Senatorial Committee asked county election officials to "segregate and preserve" affidavit ballots and related election records — a step Democracy Docket, a legal-news outlet that tracks election litigation, reported is widely read as a precursor to challenging individual ballots in court. Hurst said the party would act "swiftly" if it found evidence that ineligible votes had been counted.

Colom's legal team, led by the Elias Law Group, sent counties a letter arguing the request "has no basis in Mississippi law" and warning that segregating ballots without statutory authority could itself violate voters' rights. The NAACP said it had sent roughly two dozen staff and volunteers to Jackson and Biloxi to assist voters whose provisional ballots still needed to be "cured," or corrected, before the Nov. 10 deadline.

No lawsuit over the count itself had been filed as of Friday. That matters because Mississippi's election code gives candidates no automatic right to a recount: under state law, as summarized in guidance from election-law researchers and confirmed by decades of state attorney general opinions, there is no provision for a recount triggered by a close margin, whether requested by a candidate or not. A losing candidate's recourse is instead to petition a court after the fact to examine ballots or contest the result — a path both Hyde-Smith and Colom's campaigns have said they are prepared to take if necessary.

• Nov. 10: deadline for voters to "cure," or correct, affidavit and mail ballots with eligibility problems
• Nov. 13: deadline for county election commissions to transmit certified returns to the Secretary of State's office, per the state's official election calendar
• No automatic recount exists under Mississippi law regardless of the final margin

Stakes beyond one Senate seat

Mississippi has not sent a Black candidate to the Senate since Bruce completed his term in 1881, in the years immediately following Reconstruction, when the Mississippi legislature — not voters directly — elected both Revels and Bruce to the seat. Within a few years of Bruce's departure, the state adopted a new constitution and a wave of Jim Crow-era laws that effectively barred Black Mississippians from the ballot box for generations, a history noted in national coverage of the race and reflected in the Senate's own historical materials.

A Colom win would also make him the first Democrat elected to a Mississippi Senate seat since John Stennis won his final term in 1982, in a state that has voted reliably Republican in federal elections for decades. National forecasters had rated the seat as safely Republican heading into Election Day, a fact several analysts pointed to this week as an illustration of how unexpectedly competitive the race became.

For now, the outcome rests with county clerks and election commissioners finishing their counts rather than with either campaign. Both Colom's and Hyde-Smith's teams have said they will accept a certified result but have signaled they are prepared to go to court over how that certification is reached if the final margin remains within a few thousand votes. Mississippi election officials have given no indication the Nov. 13 certification deadline will slip.