Democrat Scott Colom leads Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by 1,936 votes in the Mississippi Senate race as of Friday morning, according to the Associated Press, and his lead has grown with nearly every new batch of ballots counted since election night. The AP has not called the race. If Colom holds on, he will become the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction and the first Democrat the state has sent to the Senate since 1982.
Early Wednesday, the race looked like a coin flip, with Colom ahead by just 43 votes out of nearly 1 million cast. That number spread fast online, and it is now out of date. By Thursday his lead had grown past 1,800 votes, and by Friday it was close to 2,000, with Colom at 49.1% to Hyde-Smith’s 48.8%. A third candidate, Ty Pinkins, took the rest.
This race was not supposed to be competitive. Trump carried Mississippi by more than 20 points in 2024, and Hyde-Smith has held the seat since 2018. The last two Black men to represent Mississippi in the Senate, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, served in the 1870s and early 1880s, during Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when formerly enslaved people briefly gained political power in the South. Revels was the first Black senator in American history.
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What happens next in the Mississippi Senate race comes down to ballots still being counted. Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson said about 3,600 mail ballots were still outstanding. Those count if they were postmarked by Election Day and arrive within five business days. The bigger pile is affidavit ballots, which is what Mississippi calls provisional ballots. Voters cast them when there is a question about their eligibility, like a name missing from the voter rolls or no photo ID at the polls. Colom’s campaign estimated 10,000 to 15,000 of them statewide.
Those ballots have broken hard for Colom so far. In Lafayette County, home of the University of Mississippi, affidavit ballots went to Colom 69% to 29%, a far wider margin than he won among all voters in the county.
That is why Hyde-Smith’s campaign is gearing up for a fight. On Thursday, the campaign sent letters to circuit clerks and county officials in all 82 Mississippi counties demanding they immediately separate every provisional ballot from regular and absentee ballots. Pulling them into their own pile makes them easier to challenge in court later. Colom’s lawyer said doing that would be unlawful. Mississippi Republican Party Chair Mike Hurst said Thursday that the election “is far from being over” and that the party has attorneys and observers throughout the state.
Mississippi’s rules make a court battle more likely than in most states. Mississippi is one of only three states, along with Illinois and Tennessee, with no way to trigger an automatic recount in a general election. There is no recount law at all. A candidate who wants one has to formally contest the election on specific legal grounds, and a recount only happens if a judge orders it. Counties have until Nov. 13 to certify their results, and the state has until Dec. 3.
The two candidates have history. In 2023, Joe Biden nominated Colom, a district attorney in northeast Mississippi since 2016, to be a federal judge. Hyde-Smith blocked the nomination, citing support his 2015 campaign received from a political action committee funded by George Soros and claiming he favored allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. The White House called her concerns “spurious,” and Mississippi’s other Republican senator, Roger Wicker, supported Colom. Blocking that judgeship is what left Colom free to run against her. Colom told CNN that losing out on the judgeship “is not a motivating factor for me at all” and said he forgives Hyde-Smith.
Mississippi voters still have a say in how this ends. Anyone who cast an affidavit ballot because they did not have a photo ID at the polls has five business days after Election Day to show an acceptable photo ID at their county circuit clerk’s office, which puts the deadline at Tuesday, Nov. 10. Ballots from voters who do not come back with ID by then will be thrown out. In a Mississippi Senate race separated by fewer than 2,000 votes, those ballots could decide who represents the state.
