Mississippi’s U.S. Senate election between Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democratic challenger Scott Colom was too close to call in the early hours of the morning on Nov. 4. At midnight, Colom led Hyde-Smith by just 28 votes out of nearly 1 million cast. About 97% of the vote was counted at the time, the Associated Press estimated.
If Colom won, he would become Mississippi’s first Democratic senator since the final election of John C. Stennis in 1982. Even more historically significant, Colom would be the first Black senator from Mississippi since Blanche K. Bruce, who took office in 1875 during Reconstruction and left office in 1881. He was Mississippi’s second Black U.S. senator after Hiram Revels.
The razor-thin margins of Mississippi’s only competitive federal election are perhaps the crowning example of a staggering national so-called “blue wave,” which has already delivered a decisive congressional majority for Democrats in both houses and flipped multiple governorships away from the GOP.
Colom’s candidacy, too, is partially of Republican design. Hyde-Smith herself blocked President Joe Biden’s nomination of Colom to a federal judgeship in the Northern District of Mississippi in 2023, freeing him to run for office this year. Hyde-Smith cited past support for Colom from a PAC tied to billionaire George Soros and Colom’s support for transgender rights and healthcare in her decision to bar the nomination.
In the days just before the election, Republican anxiety over just such a close race spurred President Donald Trump to personally appear in the state at a rally benefiting Hyde-Smith in Corinth, Mississippi, on Oct. 26. For Colom, national party recognition of his growing challenge to the incumbent Republican senator led to in-person appearances from former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Independent candidate Ty Pinkins currently has just over 2% of the vote, and it’s still unclear what effect his candidacy has had on the race. Pinkins’ performance appears strongest in some of the more heavily Republican areas on Tuesday night’s map, outside his home Sharkey County.
Regardless of how close the final tally is, there will be no runoff in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate election. General elections for federal office in Mississippi require only a simple plurality of the vote, except in special elections like Mississippi’s 2018 U.S. Senate special election.
Shortly after midnight, Hinds County election officials announced that they had paused the count for the night, meaning a full accounting of the election’s results will have to wait for the morning. Thousands of affidavit ballots also remain to be counted across the state to determine the outcome of the race.
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