Mississippi Senate Race: Scott Colom and Cindy Hyde-Smith in Tight Battleground Contest

How Mississippi Became an Unlikely Senate Battleground

As of Wednesday afternoon, Democrat Scott Colom was just a few dozen votes ahead of Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race, WTTW reported — a margin so narrow the contest remained too close to call even as it upended expectations in one of the nation’s deepest-red states.

President Donald Trump won Mississippi by 23 points just two years ago, and Hyde-Smith has held the seat since her 2018 appointment. Yet the midterms’ seismic shift toward Democrats reached even here, turning a race Republicans treated as safe into the nail-biter of the cycle.

What makes the closeness remarkable is what it would mean: Colom, a 43-year-old local district attorney, campaigned relentlessly to become the first Black senator from Mississippi since the Reconstruction era. The outcome now hangs on roughly 15,000 provisional ballots — affidavit ballots, in Mississippi parlance — still pending verification, according to Colom’s campaign.

Too close to call: Cindy Hyde-Smith, Scott Colom locked in tight Mississippi Senate race

The Race No One Expected to Be Close

Mississippi’s Black electorate, at 35% of the state, is the largest of any state, and Colom bet early that enough attention and money could put the GOP bastion in contention. He got both. Several Democratic super PACs made last-minute ad buys, and a parade of the party’s biggest names — including former Vice President Kamala Harris — joined him on the stump in the campaign’s waning weeks. Groups such as the Democracy Alliance, a network of liberal donors, made early investments to build infrastructure in the state, including helping the state branch of the NAACP open 11 voter registration sites. The NAACP said it registered more than 17,000 voters this year.

According to the CNN Voter Poll, Black voters constituted roughly 30% of the electorate in this contest, and almost all of them cast their ballots for Colom.

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“Mississippians showed up and shocked the nation,” Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement Wednesday.

On the Republican side, Trump joined Hyde-Smith for an eleventh-hour rally to boost turnout. However, Hyde-Smith has consistently trailed Trump’s performance in Mississippi: during 2020, she secured her first full term with a 10-point victory, whereas Trump carried the state by 16 points in that same election.

The Judgeship That Lit the Fuse

Hyde-Smith also laid groundwork for the challenge herself. In 2023, she blocked Colom’s nomination to a federal judgeship even though he had the backing of other Republicans, including Sen. Roger Wicker, the state’s senior senator. She took issue with a contribution from liberal billionaire George Soros to a PAC supporting Colom’s initial district attorney campaign, and also pointed to his having signed a 2021 letter condemning “the criminalization of transgender people and gender-affirming healthcare.”

Colom leading Hyde-Smith in tight Mississippi Senate race

Colom insisted to CNN that the race is not a grudge match.

“I’m a Christian. I forgive her,” he said. “Me not having a federal judgeship is not a motivating factor for me at all.”

Instead, his campaign argued the incumbent had lost touch with Mississippians’ economic pain. One of the midterms’ most attention-getting ads mocked Hyde-Smith for remarking there are “so many proteins to choose from” when asked about rising beef prices. “Pick another protein? She done lost her damn mind. I’d rather pick another senator,” one woman drawled in the ad, which quickly went viral. Colom also deleted a separate ad featuring an AI-generated depiction of Hyde-Smith after state Attorney General Lynn Fitch threatened legal action.

Candidates Declare Victory Confidence

Both sides expressed confidence Wednesday that they would prevail once the count is complete.

“Once the process plays out, where we are, where the ballots are, we’re gonna win,” Colom said at a news conference. “And it’s because the people of Mississippi turned out in historic numbers to make this race possible in a midterm election.”

Campaign manager Jake Monssen said the team was “closely monitoring” the thousands of ballots still outstanding.

FULL VIDEO: Scott Colom gives campaign update as Mississippi Senate race

“We remain confident that when every legally cast vote is fully and accurately counted, Mississippians will have reelected Cindy Hyde-Smith,” he said.

What Happens With 15,000 Ballots Outstanding

Advocates for voters and legal watchers anticipate that initial signs of how many of the approximately 15,000 affidavit ballots will be included in the final tally may not emerge until next week at the earliest. Several counties have already started vetting them. In Mississippi, provisional ballots serve several purposes, such as when a voter lacks photo ID, when someone cannot be located in the pollbook — a situation that may arise if the voter was marked as inactive — or when registration forms are incomplete.

For now, the question that defined this race — whether a Democrat can win statewide in the state with the largest Black electorate in America — remains officially unanswered, waiting on the voters whose ballots have not yet been counted.