Has the Mississippi Senate Race Been Called?
No. Mississippi's U.S. Senate race has not been called — not by the Associated Press, not by any news organisation, and not by the state. The AP's results page still lists the race as "Too Early to Call," and in the AP's latest count, from Friday evening, Democrat Scott Colom leads Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by 2,574 votes: 467,930 to 465,356, with independent Ty Pinkins at 20,028. That is a lead of about three-tenths of one percent out of more than 950,000 votes cast.
The plain reality is why it cannot be called yet. A race is called when the ballots still outstanding can no longer change the outcome — and in Mississippi the outstanding pile is bigger than the margin more than ten times over. The Associated Press estimated on Friday that about 30,000 votes were still to count, most of them mail ballots and affidavit ballots still being reviewed county by county. The certified county counts are not even due to the state until November 13. On the record as it stands tonight, nobody honest can name the winner, which is exactly why the question keeps being typed into Google while the answers flying around social media say otherwise.
The claims, meanwhile, have already declared it finished. The Congressional Black Caucus PAC congratulated Colom on Facebook, announcing that "HISTORY IS MADE IN MISSISSIPPI!" — a post the Mississippi Free Press had to fact-check, because the race has not been called. Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm leads Colom's legal effort, posted on X that "Scott Colom is going to be the next Senator from Mississippi." Hyde-Smith's campaign answered from the other side, saying she would remain in the Senate because "we believe there are thousands of votes remaining to be counted from dozens of Republican districts, and we are confident that these votes will strengthen her path to victory."
Scott Colom is going to be the next Senator from Mississippi. — Marc Elias, Democratic lawyer leading Colom's legal effort, posted while the race remained uncalled
Stated plainly, a lead is not a result, and a declaration by a campaign, a lawyer or a political action committee is not a call. A call is a judgment made on ballots actually counted, by people with no candidate in the race. When the declaration comes first and the counting comes second, the counting stops looking like the thing that decides — and voters whose ballots are still sitting in a county review pile are told, in effect, that their votes were a formality. If the winner is announced before the last lawful ballots are even allowed to arrive, what were the deadlines in the law for?
The dates that will actually settle it are close and fixed. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day count if they arrive within five business days, by Tuesday, November 10 — the window the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in June in Watson v. Republican National Committee. Voters who cast an affidavit ballot because they had no photo ID must show an acceptable ID at their circuit clerk's office by that same Tuesday, November 10, or their ballot does not count; what an affidavit ballot is, and how the review works, is set out in our explainer, What Is an Affidavit Ballot in Mississippi? Counties then send their certified counts to the state by Friday, November 13, and Secretary of State Michael Watson declares the final statewide result on December 3. Mississippi has no recount law for a race like this, as we set out in Does Mississippi Have a Recount Law for the Senate Race? — so the count happening now is the count that decides.
What is at stake in the wait is not small. If Colom's lead holds, he would be the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi since 1982 and the state's first Black senator since Blanche K. Bruce, whose term ended in 1881 — and the size of the Democrats' new Senate majority, already won, turns on this seat and Alaska's. Until the ballots are in, though, the only true sentence is the one the officials doing the counting keep repeating. Hinds County election commissioner Yvonne Robinson Ford, whose county held thousands of affidavit ballots still under review, put it this way: "I ask everyone to please be patient."