Mississippi's Senate race is still undecided, and it could make history either way

The morning after the 2026 midterms, the most watched Senate race in the country is not in Texas, not in Georgia, and not in Alaska. It is in Mississippi, where Democratic challenger Scott Colom and Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith are separated by fewer than 100 votes out of roughly 940,000 cast. NBC News and the Associated Press had not called the race as of Wednesday afternoon. Both candidates say they expect to win. Neither is backing down.

This is a state Donald Trump carried by 20 points in 2024. Every major forecaster rated the seat "Likely Republican" or safer just days before the election. And yet, here we are.

Where the count stands right now

As of 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, 95.6% of votes had been counted. Colom narrowly leads Hyde-Smith, taking 462,857 votes (48.9%) compared to Hyde-Smith's 462,792 votes (48.9%). Independent candidate Ty Pinkins has received 19,938 votes, or 2.1%.

Hyde-Smith would need to win 49% of the remaining vote to catch or overtake Colom, who currently leads. That math slightly favors Colom, but the remaining ballots have not been identified by county or type, so neither side can be certain.

Hyde-Smith led for most of the night. Colom closed the gap as late returns came in from Hinds County and from majority-Black counties in the Delta and Southwest Mississippi that had not reported earlier in the evening. In Hinds County, Colom had 61,793 votes to Hyde-Smith's 14,702.

Colom also led in DeSoto County, which Trump won by 24 points in 2024. Colom had 51.9% there to Hyde-Smith's 45.7%. That kind of suburban shift, in one of Mississippi's fastest-growing counties just south of Memphis, is the same pattern that flipped seats in Texas and Georgia on Tuesday night.

"Where we are, where the ballots are, we're gonna win," Colom said as he addressed supporters at a 10 a.m. news conference. "This is our election. We've won it. The people have done it. They've decided to go in a new direction. I'm confident of that."

In a statement, Hyde-Smith's campaign said, "Our campaign is closely monitoring the remaining count." On Tuesday evening, Hyde-Smith spoke to a crowd of supporters at a watch party in Flowood. She nearly declared victory but stopped just short, saying she would emerge as the winner by Wednesday morning.

Why this race matters so much

Trump won Mississippi by 20 points in 2024, and the state hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1982. Mississippi has been represented in the U.S. Senate exclusively by Republicans since 1989. Going into Tuesday, virtually no one in the professional forecasting world gave Colom a real shot. The Cook Political Report, Decision Desk HQ, The Economist, Inside Elections, NBC News, RealClearPolitics, and Sabato's Crystal Ball all rated the seat "Likely Republican" through the final days of the campaign.

The historical stakes are compounded by who Colom is. Democrat Scott Colom is seeking to become the first African American elected to a statewide seat in Mississippi since the Reconstruction era. If Colom wins, he would be the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi since Reconstruction, when the state Legislature elected Hiram Revels in 1870 and Blanche Bruce in 1875. Those two men were appointed by a Republican-controlled legislature, not elected by voters statewide. What Colom would accomplish is genuinely without precedent in modern Mississippi political history.

A Colom win would lift Democrats to 55 Senate seats. A Hyde-Smith win would keep Republicans at 45.

Who is Scott Colom?

Colom, 43, is a seventh-generation Mississippian who campaigned on cost of living and health care issues. He was born in Columbus, Mississippi, and built his career entirely within the state's legal system. He graduated from Millsaps College in 2005 and earned a Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the University of Wisconsin Law School.

He was Columbus's first Black city prosecutor. Colom was elected district attorney for the 16th Judicial District of Mississippi in 2015 and was sworn in on January 4, 2016. He was the first Black elected district attorney for the 16th Circuit and the first Black elected district attorney to a majority-white voting district in the history of Mississippi.

As district attorney, Colom surged resources to prosecute violent crimes, closed a record number of cold cases, and won 94% of his trials. He was elected district attorney in 2015 when, at the age of just 32, he unseated a 27-year incumbent while running on a reform platform that called for prioritizing resources to hold violent criminals accountable.

The prosecutor-turned-senator pitch was deliberate. Colom kept his message local and economic. He wants to raise the state's minimum wage, which has not increased in nearly 20 years. He also wants to lower costs for families, bring down gas and diesel prices, save the state's hospitals, and bring more jobs to Mississippi. He held over 50 town halls across the state. The message was not ideological. It was transactional.

President Joe Biden nominated Colom to the federal bench in 2023, but Hyde-Smith blocked his confirmation. That backstory gave Colom a sharper contrast with Hyde-Smith than a typical challenger would have, and it became a running theme in his campaign's framing.

Colom raised $1,874,216 in the third quarter of 2026 alone, outraising incumbent Hyde-Smith more than two to one in the campaign's best quarter, pushing his total to more than $4.5 million raised overall. In October, the Cook Political Report moved the race from "Solid Republican" to "Likely Republican," calling it the "potential sleeper race of the cycle."

Who is Cindy Hyde-Smith?

Hyde-Smith, 67, has been in the Senate since 2018 and is seeking reelection. She is the first woman elected to federal office in Mississippi. A Brookhaven cattle farmer, she was first appointed to the Senate in 2018 to fill the seat vacated by Thad Cochran, then won a special election and a full term thereafter. She entered Tuesday's race as a heavy favorite, backed by a $5 million war chest and the full weight of a state Republicans have treated as a lock for two generations.

Her campaign strategy leaned heavily on nationalization. Hyde-Smith's main campaign message was to label Colom an extremist and "the most radical Senate candidate of our lifetime." She attempted to cast him as a puppet of far-left national Democrats, with a spokesman calling him a stooge of Schumer and of billionaire donor George Soros. The attacks were familiar, but in a state where national Democrats had genuinely invested late, they had some factual grounding to draw on. Democrats began investing in the race in recent weeks, seeing an opportunity for a pickup.

Hyde-Smith faced minimal opposition in the Republican primary, winning the nomination with 80.8% of the vote. She was not battle-tested heading into a general election that turned out to be far more competitive than anyone anticipated.

What flipped? The geography of a near-upset

The map tells the story. Colom ran up margins in Hinds County (home to Jackson, the state capital) and in the majority-Black counties of the Delta region. Those are baseline Democratic areas. The genuine surprise was in suburban and mixed-district counties that had been trending Republican for years.

Until Tuesday, no Texas Democrat had won a statewide election since 1994. Several are now headed to top positions there. Mississippi followed a similar, if not yet complete, pattern. DeSoto County, the fast-growing suburb of Memphis, went for Colom despite Trump carrying it by 24 points two years ago. That is a 25-plus point shift in a single cycle.

The razor-thin margins in Mississippi's Senate race are perhaps the crowning example of a staggering national "blue wave," which has already delivered a decisive congressional majority for Democrats in both chambers and flipped multiple governorships away from the GOP. Mississippi is the last domino that hasn't fallen.

The role of Ty Pinkins and third-party math

Independent candidate Ty Pinkins currently has just over 2% of the vote, and it remains unclear what effect his candidacy has had on the race. In a margin this small, 2.1% is enormous. The question is whether Pinkins pulled more from Colom or Hyde-Smith. His vote share appears strongest in more Republican-leaning northern counties, which suggests he may have siphoned some soft Republican support rather than costing Colom crossover votes. But that is not confirmed, and analysts are still picking through the county-level data.

Regardless of how close the final tally is, there will be no runoff in Tuesday's U.S. Senate election. Mississippi does not have a runoff trigger in federal races when no candidate reaches a threshold. Whoever leads when the count is certified wins, full stop.

What happens next: certification, litigation, and the December deadline

The race is not going to resolve itself quickly. Litigation is likely in the too-close-to-call Mississippi Senate race. Both campaigns have lawyers in position. The Hyde-Smith campaign says its internal numbers show she will win once outstanding ballots are counted. Colom's team says the remaining vote is favorable to their candidate.

Counties must send their certified returns to the Secretary of State by November 13, and the Secretary of State is expected to declare the result on December 3, 2026, according to the state's 2026 elections calendar.

Between now and then, any recount requests, provisional ballot disputes, or legal challenges to individual precincts could drag the timeline further. Mississippi voters reported delays, faulty machines, and closed precincts on election day, which could become the basis for legal arguments on either side. Mississippi voters also more than doubled absentee ballot totals from the 2022 midterms, and the composition of those outstanding ballots could determine the outcome.

The national context: a blue wave with one last wave still forming

To understand why Mississippi ended up this close, you have to zoom out. Democrats swept through states no one expected on Tuesday night. Texas flipped its governorship and several statewide offices for the first time in over three decades. Georgia, Ohio, and New Mexico flipped in the statehouse column. Kansas sent its first Democratic senator in decades. The national environment was brutally unfavorable for Republicans, and that drag reached deep red Mississippi in a way no forecaster had priced in.

Democrats saw a slew of wins in Senate races Tuesday night, including in states that President Trump won by double digits in the 2024 elections. Mississippi was rated "Solid Republican" by multiple forecasters as recently as October 1. The Cook Political Report moved it only to "Likely Republican" a few weeks before the election, still not flagging it as genuinely competitive.

The wave did something waves rarely do: it reached the bottom of a very deep red map. Whether it reached far enough to flip this particular seat is the question that will keep Mississippi in the national spotlight for another month.

What a Colom win would mean, and what a Hyde-Smith survival would mean

If Colom prevails, he is not just another Democratic pickup. He is the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi by popular vote in a modern general election since John Stennis in 1982, and the first Black Mississippian elected to the Senate since Reconstruction. That is a historical rupture, not an incremental shift.

If Hyde-Smith holds on, she will have survived the worst national environment for Republicans in a generation, in a race she was supposed to win comfortably, by a margin of a few thousand votes or possibly fewer. That is its own story: a state that absorbed a 25-point shift in some counties and still returned a Republican senator. It says something about the floor of Republican support in Mississippi that even a blue wave of this magnitude could not break through.

Either outcome has implications for the Senate's final math. A Colom win would lift Democrats to 55 seats; a Hyde-Smith win would keep Republicans at 45. That difference matters for cloture votes, committee ratios, and the shape of the Senate minority's power heading into the final two years of Trump's term.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Associated Press has not called the race, and there is no indication it will before the official certification process plays out. Colom is ahead by fewer than 100 votes. Hyde-Smith is not conceding. The lawyers are watching. Mississippi does not certify until December 3.

Sources

• CBS News, Mississippi Senate race still a toss-up, with margin of under 100 votes
• Mississippi Today, Who won Mississippi's midterm Senate race? We may not know for a while
• Mississippi Free Press, Democrat Scott Colom Leads Mississippi Senate Race by 43 Votes Against Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith
• Mississippi Independent, Colom pulls ahead of Hyde-Smith by 28 votes as Mississippi Senate race goes uncalled
• NBC News, Mississippi Senate Results 2026
• The Washington Post, Mississippi Democrat Scott Colom defies odds as Senate race is too close to call
• WLBT, Scott Colom looks to unseat Cindy Hyde-Smith
• KBTX / Gray News, Mississippi Senate candidates both 'confident' in winning race as it remains too close to call
• Scott Colom for Senate, Official campaign site
• Wikipedia, 2026 United States Senate election in Mississippi
• Decision Desk HQ, 2026 Mississippi Senate General Election Results
• The Root, Scott Colom's Historic MS Senate Run