Democratic candidate Scott Colom has narrowly extended his narrow lead over incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi’s Senate race as two key voting deadlines approach Tuesday.
As of 4:30 p.m. ET, Colom, the local district attorney, had won 2,607 votes over Hyde-Smith out of 953,547 votes cast, an estimated 97% of the vote, according to the Associated Press. The difference is just 0.27 percentage points.
Independent candidate Ty Pinkins received 20,034 votes.
Tuesday is the deadline to resolve affidavits or provisional ballots cast by voters whose eligibility is contested or unclear on Election Day. This is also the deadline to receive mail-in absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day, November 3rd.
Mississippi is one of only two states where Senate elections have not yet been declared. The other is Alaska.
Democrats have so far flipped seven Republican-held Senate seats heading into the election. This will give Democrats a new majority of at least 54 seats in the 100-seat Senate in January.
Before Election Day, the state of Alaska was seen as potentially key to whether Republicans retain their slim majority in the Senate.
Mississippi has not elected a Democratic senator since racist John Stennis was elected in 1982, but most political analysts have been eyeing the state as a potential Democratic candidate. If Colom wins the race, he will be the first black senator from Mississippi since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.
In Alaska, Democratic candidate Mary Peltola led incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan by just 2,517 votes with 218,641 votes cast, a difference of 1.1 percentage points.
Mr. Peltola received 48.6% of the total votes cast. If neither she nor Sullivan receives more than 50% of the total vote, the race will move to a ranking round in which two other candidates, Gerald Hikes and another named Dan Sullivan, will be eliminated and the second choice of voters who chose their first choice will be allocated between Peltola and the incumbent.
