The Associated Press has not yet called the race because it is so close, with Democratic challenger Scott Colom ahead by about 0.1%—he has so far earned 49% of the vote compared to Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith’s 48.9%, with 96% of votes counted. It’s a stunning nail-biter of a race that, in the weeks leading up to Election Day, polls had suggested would likely be won by the Republican incumbent by a narrow margin.
Read More: What Democrats’ Midterm Gains Reveal About Trump’s Voter Coalition
If Colom, a district attorney, wins the race, it would be the first time that Mississippi voters have elected a Democrat to represent them in the U.S. Senate since 1982. A Democratic victory would also be a remarkable shift in a state that President Donald Trump won by a nearly 23-point margin just two years ago.
Both candidates appeared to be optimistic that the election would ultimately go their way, though they also acknowledged that the race is still too close to call. Colom said in a statement early Wednesday morning, “I am confident we will ultimately flip this seat.”
Speaking to a crowd of her supporters on Election Night, Hyde-Smith said she was confident that she would hold her seat in the upper chamber.
When asked about Hyde-Smith’s speech at a press conference on Wednesday, Colom replied, “Bless her heart.”
The state has five business days after Election Day to count affidavit ballots. An individual would turn in such a ballot, which is also called a provisional ballot, in a situation in which they believe they’re eligible and registered to vote but are unable to cast a standard ballot—for instance, if their name is not in their local polling place’s records. These votes are only counted once election workers verify the individual’s information. Mississippi also permits mail-in ballots that arrive within five days after Election Day, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day, to be counted.
“Because of the razor-thin margins we currently see, I don’t expect any results to be called before then,” Ommundsen says.
How did the Mississippi Senate race become such a tight contest?
Historically, the party in the White House loses seats in midterm elections, and that pressure on Republicans was compounded in this election cycle because of historically low approval for Trump driven in large part by the economy, as well as the war in Iran.
“Nearly all counties that had a Senate election on the ballot moved towards the left compared to how they voted in 2024,” she says, though she notes that there are some exceptions. “Mississippi just happens to be one of those elections that was closer and perhaps more ripe for a flip.”
But he cautions that the close contest in Mississippi is not necessarily a sign that the deep-red state is turning blue or even purple. It’s possible, he says, that Republican voters didn’t cast their ballots for a Democrat, and instead stayed home.
Hitefield also says that there’s a lot of “voter apathy” within the Republican party with regards to Hyde-Smith, and she hasn’t performed as well as Mississippi’s other Republican Senator, Roger Wicker, in past elections. Wicker won his re-election bid in 2024 by a more than 25-point margin. Hyde-Smith, meanwhile, won her re-election fight in 2020 by about 10 points.
National polling ahead of Election Day indicated that an overwhelming majority of American voters felt that the economy was a crucial issue for them heading into this year’s midterms.
Ommundsen points out that Hyde-Smith didn’t make many public campaign appearances in this year’s election cycle; one of the few appearances the Senator made was last week, when she gave very brief remarks at a rally the President held for her in Mississippi.
“I think that it was a real mistake by her campaign, regardless of what the outcome looks like at the end of this,” Hitefield says. “Even if she does win, she didn’t do, really, what she needed to win with any sort of safety. I think that’s something [where] if she does win, she’ll need to think about, moving forward, how to strategize more effectively.”
If Colom wins, he would also become the first Black Senator from Mississippi since the 19th century—the last time the state was represented by a Black lawmaker in the upper chamber was in 1875, during Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War.
“It would be an unprecedented outcome when it comes to the history of Mississippi,” Hitefield says.
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