Mississippi Senate Race Between Colom and Hyde-Smith Remains Uncalled at 95% Reporting
With a razor-thin margin persisting into the day after the 2026 midterms, the Mississippi Senate outcome will shape the final composition of the incoming Senate majority.
The Mississippi U.S. Senate race between Democrat Scott Colom and Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith remained too close to call as of November 5, 2026, with 95 percent of ballots counted, according to CBS News. No winner has been projected by any major network or wire service as of publication.
Austin Park, editor-in-chief at VoteHub, told CBS News on November 5 that the remaining uncounted ballots and the closeness of the margin prevented a projection. The specific vote totals for each candidate at the 95 percent threshold have not been publicly released by the Mississippi Secretary of State's office in a final certified form as of this report.
Scott Colom is a circuit court judge and Democrat from Columbus, Mississippi. Cindy Hyde-Smith is the Republican incumbent who was first appointed to the Senate in 2018 by then-Governor Phil Bryant to fill the seat vacated by Thad Cochran, according to the official U.S. Senate biographical directory. Hyde-Smith subsequently won a November 2018 special election runoff and was re-elected in 2020, per Federal Election Commission certified results.
Mississippi is a state Donald Trump carried by approximately 16 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election, according to certified state results on file with the Mississippi Secretary of State. A Democratic win in this race would represent a seat change in a state Republicans have held at the Senate level continuously since the 2018 appointment.
The uncalled Mississippi race is one of at least two Senate contests still unresolved following Tuesday's elections. The Alaska Senate race also remained uncalled as of November 5, 2026. Taken together, these two outstanding races could affect the precise size of the Democratic Senate majority that networks and wire services began projecting on election night, as reported by The Congressional Times in Senate Races in Mississippi and Alaska Remain Uncalled After Midterms.
Republican redistricting efforts in multiple states also came under scrutiny following Tuesday's results. Republicans undertook mid-decade congressional map redraws in several states in an attempt to maintain House control, according to CBS News. CBS News reported that analysts are examining whether those redraws produced a "dummymander," a term used when a party over-concentrates its own voters in an attempt to maximize seats but instead leaves adjacent districts more competitive for the opposing party.
The specific states involved in mid-decade Republican redistricting efforts, the congressional districts redrawn, and the vote margins in each of those districts are on file with each state's legislative records and the respective secretaries of state. The final House seat count will determine whether those redistricting efforts produced their intended effect.
Mississippi law governs the timeline for counting remaining ballots. Provisional ballots and any outstanding absentee ballots must be counted within a window set by state statute before official canvassing begins. The Mississippi Secretary of State's office would be the authoritative source for the precise number of ballots remaining and the legal deadline for their inclusion in the count.
Final certification of Mississippi's Senate race results requires action by the Mississippi State Board of Election Commissioners, which includes the Governor, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of State, per Mississippi Code Section 23-15-601. The timeline for that certification following the close of counting is governed by the same statute.
What remains unknown as of publication: the exact vote margin between Colom and Hyde-Smith, the number and type of ballots still outstanding, and the county-level breakdown of uncounted votes. The Mississippi Secretary of State's official election night results portal and subsequent canvass documents would provide those figures. The Congressional Times will update this report when the Secretary of State releases updated ballot counts or when a projection is made.