The honest answer is Tuesday at the earliest — and possibly not until counties certify on November 13. Three days after Election Day, Mississippi's U.S. Senate race between Democrat Scott Colom and Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is one of only two Senate races in the country still uncalled, because the ballots that will decide it are still arriving and still being checked, on a timetable written into state law.
Colom leads, and the lead has been growing as the count moves. It was 43 votes at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, 1,138 votes by Wednesday evening, and 2,498 votes in the Associated Press count checked on Friday — 467,846 to 465,348, with an estimated 96.91 percent of the vote in. The Associated Press still lists the race as too early to call, and its rule explains why: the AP calls a race only when the trailing candidate has no remaining path to close the gap. Here, the pool of uncounted ballots is still several times larger than the gap.
Secretary of State Michael Watson laid out what is still out. About 3,600 absentee ballots sent by mail were outstanding as of Wednesday. Under Mississippi law, a mail ballot postmarked by Election Day counts if it arrives within five business days — which makes the deadline 5 p.m. on Tuesday, November 10. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that rule in June, in Watson v. Republican National Committee. Behind the mail ballots sits the bigger unknown: affidavit ballots, cast by voters who did not show an accepted photo ID at the polls or whose names did not appear on the rolls. A voter who lacked ID has five days to bring one to the circuit clerk or the ballot does not count, and counties process the rest inside the 10-day window they have to certify their results. Counties must certify by November 13, and the Secretary of State's office declares the final statewide results on December 3.
"Scott Colom is going to be the next Senator from Mississippi. I am proud that Elias Law Group is leading the legal effort to ensure that happens." — Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, posted on X on November 4, with the race still uncalled
Nobody official is willing to put a number on the affidavit pile, and the estimates are far apart: the Colom campaign says 10,000 to 15,000 were cast, while Mississippi Republican Party chairman Mike Hurst has estimated about 17,000 affidavit ballots among roughly 20,000 ballots still out. Hyde-Smith's lawyers and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have already demanded that all 82 counties separate and preserve the affidavit ballots, which is where any court fight would be fought — Mississippi has no recount law, so a challenge runs through litigation over specific ballots, not a fresh count. The seat will not decide control of the Senate, which Democrats have already won; it decides the size of their majority, and whether Mississippi sends a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since John Stennis in 1982.
So the dates to watch are fixed even if the call is not: the last mail ballots land by 5 p.m. Tuesday, counties certify on November 13, and the state declares the result on December 3. The AP can call the race at any point once the remaining ballots can no longer change the outcome — but until Tuesday's deadline passes, neither campaign can honestly claim the math is closed, whatever is posted on X: "Scott Colom is going to be the next Senator from Mississippi."