Scott Colom Wins Mississippi Senate Seat as Late Ballots Lift His Lead From 43 Votes to 4,669

Scott Colom, a Democratic local prosecutor, won Mississippi’s U.S. Senate seat on Wednesday 11 November when Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded, eight days after the election. His lead, 43 votes on the morning after the polls closed, reached 4,669 once affidavit and absentee ballots were counted, and he becomes Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction.

The Associated Press called the race for Mr Colom on Wednesday evening, after counties reported updated results that included provisional ballots, the Mississippi Free Press recorded in its results liveblog. He “led by just 4,585 votes when the race was first called,” according to the AP, as quoted by Democracy Docket; by the evening, MS NOW reported, the lead was 4,669. Senator Hyde-Smith called Mr Colom at about 6 p.m. Eastern to concede, a Colom campaign spokesman told MS NOW. In a video message she said: “While this is not the outcome we worked for or hoped for, I respect the decision of Mississippi voters,” NBC News reported. The results are unofficial and uncertified.

Mr Colom, speaking that night, described the state’s Democrats this way: “We were never a lost cause. We were a betrayed cause.” Governor Tate Reeves, a Republican, congratulated him and said: “I hope to collaborate as we continue our very important work to support Mississippi families.”

How did a 43-vote lead become 4,669?

Slowly, and almost all of it after Election Night. The table is this publication’s timeline of the statewide margin as it was published during the count, with days counted from Election Day, Tuesday 3 November. The figures are AP counts as reported in the Mississippi Free Press liveblog unless another source is named; the 9 November figure is from AP data on ABC News, as this publication reported on Monday.

Three things follow from those numbers, by our arithmetic. First, 4,626 of the 4,669 votes in the final lead, 99.1 per cent, were added after the 11:58 a.m. count on the day after the election. Second, the lead fell only once in the published series, by 38 votes on Tuesday morning, which is the one point at which Senator Hyde-Smith’s campaign could show the trend moving her way. Third, 2,133 votes of the margin, 45.7 per cent, arrived in roughly the last 32 hours, between Tuesday morning and the call, which is when the affidavit ballots of Hinds, the county that includes Jackson, were tallied.

That pattern is what the Mississippi calendar produces. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day counted if they arrived within five business days, and affidavit voters, Mississippi’s name for those who cast provisional ballots, had until 5 p.m. on Tuesday 10 November to show photo identification to their circuit clerk if that was the problem with their ballot, the Free Press reported. Counties could not finish before that deadline, and most of the larger ones did not try. Hinds County, which includes Jackson, had more than 8,000 in-person absentee ballots, which had already been counted, and 64 mail-in absentee ballots, according to a correction in the liveblog.

What the affidavit ballots show

That most were thrown out, and that the remainder still mattered. On Wednesday morning Hinds County officials accepted 817 affidavit ballots and rejected 1,609, the Free Press reported. Democracy Docket wrote that the rejections were most likely for improper registration or votes cast in the wrong precinct. The accepted ballots went 703 to Mr Colom, 96 to Senator Hyde-Smith, eight to the independent Ty Pinkins and one to a write-in, by the county’s tally as reported in the liveblog. That tally sums to 808, nine fewer than the number accepted; the reports do not explain the difference.

Read together, the rows say something the toplines do not. Hinds rejected 66.3 per cent of the affidavit ballots its voters cast, against 22.3 per cent of decided ballots in neighbouring Rankin, a Republican county where Senator Hyde-Smith led overall by 62 per cent to 37. Even after that rate of rejection, Mr Colom took 87 per cent of the Hinds affidavit ballots that were counted and netted 607 votes from them, more than the whole of his lead at 5:30 p.m. on the day after the election. In Rankin, the affidavit ballots split almost evenly. In Madison he took 56.3 per cent of them. Statewide affidavit totals have not been published in the sources read, so the share of the final margin owed to them alone cannot yet be stated.

What happens before he is sworn in?

Certification, which in Mississippi has two steps and no recount. Counties were due to certify their results by Friday 13 November, the Free Press reported, and Hancock County scheduled the count of its 120 affidavit ballots for 10 a.m. on Thursday 12 November, a number too small to affect the outcome. The Secretary of State then sums the county returns and declares the winner “not longer than thirty (30) days after the election,” under Section 23-15-605 of the Mississippi Code, which by our count is Thursday 3 December. The state’s contest statute, Section 23-15-951, gives a losing candidate 20 days after the election to petition, which ends on Monday 23 November; with a concession on the record, no contest has been announced.

The term begins on 3 January 2027, when the Twentieth Amendment ends the current senators’ terms at noon. Mr Colom’s victory gives Democrats at least 55 seats in the next Senate, NBC News reported; he is the eighth Democrat to take a Republican-held seat this year, and the only race still uncalled is Alaska’s, where a ranked-choice count is still to come. If Mary Peltola wins there, MS NOW noted, the majority would be 56 to 44. Those 55 or 56 are also the electorate for the caucus vote on whether Chuck Schumer stays leader.

Where the seat came from

From appointment, and before that from a legislature. Senator Hyde-Smith was appointed on 2 April 2018 to the seat Thad Cochran left, becoming Mississippi’s first woman senator, and won the remainder of the term on 27 November 2018, according to the Senate Historical Office’s Mississippi timeline. The same record shows Hiram Revels taking the oath on 25 February 1870 as the first African American to serve in the Senate, and Blanche Kelso Bruce serving the first full term by an African American senator, from 4 March 1875 to 3 March 1881. Both were chosen by the state legislature. Mississippi’s first directly elected senator, John Sharp Williams, was elected on 7 November 1916 after the Seventeenth Amendment took effect, so Mr Colom is the first Black senator Mississippi’s voters have elected themselves, as Democracy Docket noted. The state last sent a Democrat to the Senate in 1982, and Donald Trump carried it by 23 points in 2024, NBC reported.

The route to the seat ran through a different Senate procedure. President Joe Biden nominated Mr Colom in 2022 to the federal district court for the Northern District of Mississippi, with Senator Roger Wicker’s approval, and Senator Hyde-Smith declined to return the “blue slip” the Judiciary Committee asks home-state senators for, which stopped the nomination, Talking Points Memo reported. The senator who withheld a courtesy on his nomination will now hand him the seat she held.

Mr Colom is 43. MS NOW quoted him on the campaign’s early months: “There were times that I couldn’t get donors to answer the phone.” The Cook Political Report had rated the race Solid Republican, a rating Mr Colom said on 9 November had made it “much more difficult to fundraise.” The next fixed points are Friday’s county certifications and the state’s declaration by 3 December; on the published numbers, the second will record a margin that stood at 43 votes on the morning after the election.