JACKSON, Miss. — More than a week of counting ended Wednesday evening with a result few in Mississippi politics had predicted. Democrat Scott Colom beat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, according to The Associated Press, which called the Senate race after the last batches of absentee and affidavit ballots were tallied.
In the AP count, Colom led by 4,669 votes, 473,336 to 468,667. He had 49.2% of the vote to 48.7% for Hyde-Smith, with about 99% in. CNN and NBC News projected the same winner earlier in the evening.
The call gives the Democratic caucus 55 seats in the new Senate to 44 for Republicans. Alaska is now the only Senate race still uncalled, and Democrat Mary Peltola leads Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan there.
A week of counting
Colom’s lead on election night was just 65 votes. It grew almost every day after that, as counties worked through mail ballots and affidavit, or provisional, ballots.
Hinds and Madison counties verified their provisional and mail-in ballots on Wednesday, and Colom came out of it 4,157 votes ahead, the Clarion Ledger reported. Later batches widened the gap again.
Shortly before CNN’s projection, Colom called on Hyde-Smith to concede. “At this stage in the vote tally for Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race, a Cindy Hyde-Smith victory is now a mathematically impossibility,” his statement read. His team counted differently. Adding certified results from 24 counties to the AP totals, it put Colom’s margin at 5,568 votes.
Hyde-Smith had not given up the race on Tuesday. “We are still counting votes and there’s a few thousand out. We feel confident,” she told reporters at the Capitol, according to CNN. By Wednesday, Colom’s campaign said she had called him to concede, the Clarion Ledger reported, and Colom was set to declare victory Wednesday night.
A seat Democrats last won in 1982
Colom, 43, is a district attorney. He will be the first Democrat Mississippi has elected to the Senate since 1982, according to Reuters, and the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction. Blanche Bruce, the last Black senator from Mississippi, was elected in 1874.
The Cook Political Report had rated the race Likely Republican. President Donald Trump won Mississippi by nearly 23 points in 2024, and he travelled to the state in the final week to campaign for Hyde-Smith.
Colom centred his campaign on the cost of living. Colom attacked Hyde-Smith over prices, calling her “Cindy High-Prices,” NPR reported. Her remark on high beef prices — that voters have “so many other proteins to choose from” — became a viral ad for Colom, one that told voters to pick another senator.
Colom described his own campaign in an October interview with Reuters. In the same interview he said Mississippi voters felt “betrayed” by Trump policies such as the war in Iran, which has driven up fuel prices.
“We did it the hard way, the grassroots way,”
The nomination Hyde-Smith blocked
Colom’s run against Hyde-Smith went back further than this campaign. Three years earlier she had blocked President Joe Biden’s nomination of Colom to serve as a federal district judge in northern Mississippi. The state’s other senator, Republican Roger Wicker, backed the nomination.
On election night, Hyde-Smith told supporters she had won. “I blocked Scott Colom from being a federal judge, and you blocked him from being a US senator,” she said, according to CNN.
Counties now have until Friday, Nov. 13, to certify their results to the Secretary of State. Mississippi has no recount process, so the count, once certified, settles the seat.