Democratic candidate Scott Colom slightly increased his narrow lead over incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi’s Senate election as two key ballot deadlines reached Tuesday.
Colom, a local prosecutor, as of 4:30 p.m. ET, led Hyde-Smith by 2,607 votes, out of 953,547 votes counted, with about 97% of the vote, according to the Associated Press. This represents a margin of only 0.27 percentage points.
Independent candidate Ty Pinkins received 20,034 votes.
Tuesday is the deadline to resolve affidavits or provisional ballots, which are filed by voters whose eligibility is disputed or unclear on Election Day. This is also the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots, postmarked on Election Day, November 3.
Mississippi is one of two states whose Senate elections have not been called. Alaska is the other.
So far, Democrats have flipped seven Republican-held Senate seats ahead of the election. That gives Democrats a new Senate majority of at least 54 seats in the 100-member chamber in January.
Alaska, before Election Day, was seen as a key factor in whether Republicans would maintain their slim majority in the Senate.
Mississippi, which has not elected a Democratic senator since segregationist John Stennis in 1982, was on the radar of few political analysts as a possible candidate for Democrats. If Colom wins his race, he will become Mississippi’s first black senator since the Reconstruction period following the Civil War.
In Alaska, Democratic candidate Mary Peltola is ahead of incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan by just 2,517 votes, with a total of 218,641 votes counted, a margin of 1.1 percentage points.
Peltola holds 48.6% of the total votes. If neither she nor Sullivan receives more than 50 percent of the total vote, the race will go to a runoff in which the other two candidates, Gerald Heikes and another candidate named Dan Sullivan, will be eliminated, and the second choices of voters who made him their first choice will be split between Peltola and the incumbent.
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