Mississippi Senate: Scott Colom extends tight lead over Hyde-Smith as ballot deadlines hit

Democratic nominee Scott Colom added slightly to his narrow lead over incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in the Mississippi Senate election as two key ballot deadlines hit Tuesday.

Colom, a local district attorney, as of 4:30 p.m. ET, was ahead of Hyde-Smith by 2,607 votes, out of 953,547 votes counted, with an estimated 97% of the votes in, according to the Associated Press. That's a margin of just .27 percentage points.

Independent candidate Ty Pinkins had 20,034 votes.

Tuesday is the deadline for resolving so-called affidavit or provisional ballots, which are cast by voters whose eligibility is disputed or unclear on Election Day. It is also the deadline for the receipt of mail-in absentee ballots that are postmarked by Election Day, Nov. 3.

Mississippi is one of just two states whose Senate election has not been called. Alaska is the other.

Democrats so far have flipped seven Senate seats held by Republicans going into the election. That gives Democrats a new majority in the Senate of at least 54 seats in the 100-member chamber come January.

Alaska before Election Day was viewed as possibly key to the question of whether Republicans would retain their narrow majority in the Senate.

Mississippi, which has not elected a Democratic senator since the segregationist John Stennis in 1982, was on few political analysts' radar as a possible pickup for Democrats. If Colom wins his race, he would be the first Black senator from Mississippi since the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era.

In Alaska, Democratic nominee Mary Peltola is ahead by just 2,517 votes over incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, with 218,641 total votes counted, a margin of 1.1 percentage points.

Peltola has 48.6% of the total vote. If neither she nor Sullivan gets more than 50% of the total vote, the race will go to a ranked-choice round, in which the two other candidates, Gerald Heikes, and another candidate named Dan Sullivan, will be eliminated, and the second choices of voters who made them their first choice will be allocated between Peltola and the incumbent.