The Associated Press projected on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, that Democratic challenger Scott Colom has won Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race. Colom defeated Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in a contest that took eight days to finalize following the November 3 election.
The victory marks the first time a Democrat has won a Senate seat in Mississippi since 1982. Colom will also become the state’s first Black U.S. senator since the Reconstruction era. The win represents the eighth Senate seat flipped by the Democratic Party during this election cycle.
The race remained uncalled for over a week as election officials processed a surge of affidavit ballots. According to reporting by The Atlantic, more than 200,000 Mississippi voters were moved to "inactive" status before Election Day after the state used commercial credit data to update voter rolls. This forced thousands of voters to use affidavit ballots that required individual review by county election commissioners. As of Wednesday, Colom held a lead of more than 4,600 votes, an increase from his 65-vote lead on election night.
The shift in representation follows a campaign where Colom, a district attorney, positioned himself as a "commonsense Democrat" who praised Donald Trump's border policies and diverged from his party on the issue of transgender athletes in women's sports. Voters in Mississippi may see a change in how the state interacts with federal appointments; Hyde-Smith previously used a "blue slip" to block Colom’s 2023 nomination to a federal judgeship by President Joe Biden. The use of affidavit ballots for thousands of voters highlights the impact of Mississippi’s lack of early in-person voting, a policy shared only by Alabama and New Hampshire.
The narrow margin and the delay in results underscore the impact of state voter roll maintenance, which affected at least 200,000 registrations this year. The late investment of $1.2 million by the Senate Majority PAC on October 20 suggests a shift in national party strategy toward states previously considered non-competitive. Colom is expected to be sworn into the Senate when the new Congress convenes in January.