Mississippi and Alaska Senate Races Stay Razor-Thin as Every Last Ballot Becomes a Battle
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The Mississippi Senate race has Democratic candidate Scott Colom ahead of incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by about 1,000 votes, while Alaska's contest between Mary Peltola and Daniel S. Sullivan is headed toward ranked-choice tabulation after a narrow mail-in ballot count that could still reshape the outcome.
Mississippi and Alaska Senate races remain undecided as officials keep counting absentee and provisional ballots, a reminder of how fragile and contested U.S. elections can be when every ballot is squeezed through a political system built to produce suspense. In Mississippi, Democratic nominee Scott Colom holds a slim lead of roughly 1,000 votes over Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, according to the state secretary of state, with about 3,600 mail ballots and an unknown number of affidavit ballots still outstanding. Because the state has no automatic recount mechanism, any attempt to challenge the result would have to go through the courts. Colom urged voters to submit the documentation needed for pending ballots and said his team would defend the election process from interference and manipulation.
"We have hundreds of volunteers, we’ve got local lawyers that are going to be at the county meetings in each county. We will protect the process of this election, we will protect the integrity of this election," Colom said at a news conference.
In Alaska, Democratic candidate Mary Peltola leads incumbent Republican Senator Daniel S. Sullivan by fewer than 1,000 votes, with roughly a quarter of the expected vote still not counted. Most of the ballots left to process are mail-in votes, which have historically leaned Democratic, but the final result will depend on a ranked-choice tabulation set for Nov. 18 if no candidate clears the 50 percent mark in the first round. Analysis indicates that more than a third of voters who chose third-party candidates as their first choice failed to rank any backup options, which may blunt their influence in later rounds and expose the limits of a voting system already criticized for confusing voters.
Both races sit inside a broader midterm picture in which Democrats are on track for a 50-seat majority in the House, while Republicans face internal fractures and a scramble over leadership. Speaker Mike Johnson announced he will not seek the Republican conference chairmanship, opening a contest between Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan. Vice President JD Vance blamed Republican losses on the war in Iran, a claim partly echoed by President Trump, whose team appears eager to normalize failure as strategy.
"The reason we lost is the war," Vance wrote on social media.
"If I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again," Trump said, describing Vance’s assessment as "largely true."
The narrow margins in Mississippi and Alaska underscore just how decisive the remaining absentee and provisional ballots may be in determining the final balance of power in the Senate, and how much of the process still hinges on ballots that too often arrive late, disputed, or ignored.