On the day after the election, Scott Colom led Cindy Hyde-Smith by 65 votes in an incomplete, unofficial count. On Wednesday evening the Associated Press declared him the winner, eight days after Mississippi voted, with AP figures putting him at 49.2 percent to Hyde-Smith’s 48.7.
Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney, is the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Mississippi since 1982 and the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction. He is also the eighth Democrat this year to flip a Republican-held seat, which puts Democrats at 55 seats or more next year, with Alaska the only Senate race still uncalled.
Every outlet has the milestone. What the milestone stories skip is how the race closed, because the closing is the argument: Hyde-Smith did not lose to a late fluke, she ran out of arithmetic, in a state Colom says his own national party had written off.
What the map said
Trump carried Mississippi by more than 20 points in 2024 and endorsed Hyde-Smith, calling her “100% MAGA.” Cook Political Report rated the seat Solid Republican before moving it to Lean Republican.
We laid out Hyde-Smith’s path in numbers on Monday. The state Republican chair, Mike Hurst, had said roughly 20,000 ballots were still uncounted, and with Colom ahead by 2,574 she needed 56.4 percent of every one of them to pass him. Since then the lead has grown by 1,830 votes, and the AP estimated that fewer than 15,000 ballots were left. Run the same arithmetic: to erase 4,404 votes with at most 15,000 ballots left, treating each as a vote for one of the two, she has to win those ballots by at least 29 points. That is at least 65 percent of everything remaining, and the ballots were not moving her way.
Colom had won a higher share of affidavit ballots than he took on Election Day night, and in Hinds County, which includes Jackson, he was winning 80 percent of the vote to her 19. Kamala Harris carried Hinds by 46 points in 2024. Colom’s 61-point margin there is about 15 points better than the top of the ticket managed two years ago.
The sharpest account of why this was supposed to be impossible came from Colom himself. “We were never a lost cause. We were betrayed cause,” he said, aiming at Hyde-Smith and at the national Democratic Party for not competing in the state.
We think the numbers back him. A seat labeled safe tells donors and party committees to look elsewhere, and it tells voters nobody is coming, which makes the label a self-fulfilling forecast and a choice dressed as a fact. Mississippi voters just overturned that choice, in a state where the incumbent’s line on high beef prices was that Mississippians have “so many proteins to choose from.” Trump’s endorsement did not save her. If the national party treated Mississippi the way Colom says it did, it should spend the next two years explaining why.
Hyde-Smith has not conceded on the record in anything we could find. MS NOW reports, citing two sources close to Colom’s campaign, that she called him around 6 p.m. Eastern. Counties have until Friday, November 13, to certify, and Mississippi has no automatic recount, so the official count is the last step between the projection and the swearing-in. It would take a swing of thousands of votes to change the outcome, and the arithmetic above says those votes do not exist.